The Double Bind Quotes
"Memory, she knew—especially when you were her age—was nothing if not eccentric."
"Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed."
"The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance—that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel."
"Sometimes, even many years later, when she would be trying to fight her way to sleep through the flurries of wakefulness, she would see those woods after the leaves had fallen, and visualize only the long finger grips of the skeletal birches."
"She could tell. But she shrugged this off and further curtailed her more casual friendships."
"Pure and simple, if Laurel had not started venturing most mornings to the school’s natatorium, she would never have met the University of Vermont alumna who ran the homeless shelter in Burlington."
"It was the first time she had been back in the presence of either of her assailants since the attack, and the first time she had studied their faces in the flesh."
"I’ve stood beside her and read the names of the homeless at the annual BEDS service at the Unitarian church."
"He saved his volatility and his righteous wrath for the politicians and the policymakers who offended him, and he unleashed it only in print—never in person."
"I don’t know what it is about the pictures that got under her skin," her father said. "I have no idea what she sees in them. But the sooner we can get her off this task and onto something else, the better."
"You’re treating Laurel like a child. I think we need to confront this head-on—not try to distract her like she’s a toddler."
"I just saw the pictures as publicity, David, that’s all. Maybe a little cash for the organization—assuming the collection is actually worth something. But it’s all proving too much trouble, isn’t it?"
"She’s fragile, Katherine," her father was telling the woman. "You know that. You’ve known her a lot longer than I have."
"What did the neighbors think? Sometimes Laurel tried to imagine. Did the Buchanans care?"
"It was a classic New England church with a pair of tall, stately sugar maples out front, their colors just starting their transformation into what soon would become a phantasmagoric rainbow of reds."
"I want to learn about a member of this congregation who recently died—and a friend of his."
"They sat over there," the schoolteacher said, extending one of her long fingers with the lovely nails in the direction of the pews on the other side of the sanctuary.
"Bobbie and Reese. I think they might have lived together, but I’m not sure. Why are you interested in them? Are you related to one of them?"
"I’d wondered what happened to him. He just disappeared off the face of the planet, didn’t he? When did he die? And how?"
"We can settle in Louisville, if you’d like. Or Boston. Or Paris. Or London. It makes no difference to me. So long as we’re together, we can be happy anywhere."
"I stayed awake by imagining our future together. It is a future where you won’t be bullied, where you won’t have to wonder where your husband has gone."
"I am sorry for the ways we broke your collarbone and your fingers and your foot. And I am sorry for holding you down while Russ raped you in those two places."
"I am sorry that I held you by your arms while Russ Hagen cut you so badly."
"I wish I could make it up to you. I wish I could go back in time and not do those awful things to you."
"You understood a person better in black and white."
"I can take care of myself. And I can take care of us."
"She had expected to find the inscribed photograph, the one Jay had given Daisy in Louisville, when the two had been young and in love."
"But she slept little that night, because she had detoured to the country club in West Egg on her way home."