Great Big Beautiful Life

“You know, my mother was ahead of her time. The kind of woman who wanted to have it all. She knew she deserved it too. But the problem is, once you love someone, you can’t have it all anymore. Love comes with sacrifice. That’s how it works.”

“He was the one who built the House of Ives as the world knows it. But I’ve always thought of him as the beginning of the end. The stepping stone that decided the entire path. The first domino that tipped. The one who, for better or worse, set every moment of my life into motion.”

“Remembering my decisions don’t make much of a difference in the end.”

“Pretending everything’s fine only works for so long. And I don’t know. It freaks me out a little, that I could…that I could feel like this, about someone who’s good at pretending to be fine. That I could miss it, if you’re actually not. It was about me. Like you said.”

“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”

“I promise. I love touching you. I love kissing you. I love hanging out with you. I love this.”

“But this is who I am, and even if you don’t understand it, couldn’t you just pretend for a few days a year that you respect me? That you like me? Because I can’t figure out how to be anyone else, and it’s lonely, it’s so fucking lonely being the person who doesn’t belong in this family.”

“I’ve always felt most myself when I’m alone.”

“I feel like you’re mine. Like you’re mine in a way no one else ever has been.”

“When you don’t have the people who love you around, reminding you who you are, that story feels bigger and realer than anything else. You lose yourself inside the character with your name and face.”

“Sometimes I just miss this. Being close to someone. Being touched. Not just sex, I mean.”

“I think she loves me because I’m her daughter. But I’ve never felt sure she loves me because I’m me. Does that make sense?”

“But if you want something done right, you don’t go with easy. I’ve thought about it, and this is how I want to do it.”

“Every bad thing that every perfect stranger said about him mattered. Because he wasn’t used to discounting it. He was used to people’s opinions of him having been formed by…well, him. His actions and intentions, their personal experience with him.”

“Sad for Peggy. That was my favorite song on the album. ‘Peggy All the Time.’ And I don’t know, I just knew it had to be true. That you couldn’t write a love song like that if you hadn’t found a once-in-a-lifetime love. And I didn’t want her to have lost the person who gave her that.”

“Inappropriate? I didn’t think so. Curious? Exceptionally, seeing as how my husband had to have passed away at least thirty years before you were even born.”

“It’s just that somehow, almost everything you say makes me want to kiss you.”

“I understood what really mattered. I understood my priorities. I understood what, in this life, was nonnegotiable for me. A lot of people don’t find that out until it’s too late. They wait to say things, and they don’t get the chance. So collecting other people’s stories, learning from their mistakes, it is a gift too. You are who you are right now in part because of what you did for Len and his family. You can’t control any of that other stuff you worry about, but you can control what you do.”