from "Honey, Baby, Sweetheart" by Deb Caletti

"I hate that, I really do, when people use honesty as a cover for cruelty.... and if we're sensitive, we believe those insults.  We forget that just because something is honest it is not necessarily the truth." 


"...It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don't want to lose someone...."

"To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery." 

"...Jeez, these people you were supposed to want to be like could really be disappointing." 

"It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting." 

"'You fall in love and you think you're finding yourself.  But too often you're looking inside him for you, and that's a fact. There's only one place you can find yourself.' She patted her chest." 

"Love can come when you're already who you are, when you are filled with you.  Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.  Not when it's your definition."


"....help me remember that this was just one chapter in a long life..."

"We held on to each other, wrapped up in... the quilt of guilt and innocence, good intentions and failings, full but imperfect hearts." 

"Sometimes our minds just make us go on clutching something.  Sometimes we get so used to holding that we forget to let go." 

"I wondered if there were some pieces of your life that would always be too monumental to ever leave you.  Some events in life that were fossils embedded in rock, the wrinkles etched on an old person's face, words imprinted in a book.  Permanent, permeating.  I told Mom what I was thinking.  'You're right,' she said.  'Yes.  Words imprinted in a book.  But Ruby, then you turn the page." 

"Because what is more like love than the ocean?  You can play in it, drown in it.  It can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog; hidden behind a curve of road, and then suddenly there in full glory.  Its waves come like breaths, in and out, in and out, body stretched to forever in its possibilities, and yet its heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic."

"The first definition of the word relative is 'relevant,' after all." 

"This is what I know: We are all a volume on the shelf of the library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands.  A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as feisty; we are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers.  And love -- it is not the book itself, but the binding.  It can rip us apart or hold us together."