Laurie Frankel Quotes & Sayings

Not ever. Not once. You never know. You only guess. This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake. It's impossible. It's heartbreaking. It's maddening. But there's no alternative. — Laurie Frankel

Sam rocked backwards and felt all the breath leave his body. Sam felt all his breath leave the room, the apartment, the building. the city. Sam felt all his breath leave the world, the night, and travel up to the stars where it turned to ice and stretched atom-thin into every corner of the galaxy. Then it retracted, gathering up all the black world, and wound its way back through interstellar space and dark matter and the secrets of infinity, back into the earth's orbit, back into his night in his city, back into his very lungs. It was okay. He was just trying to help, to ease woes and mend hearts and cool seared souls, to guide the bereaved out of the land of the lost, to make the mourning a little less lonesome. He was forgiven. — Laurie Frankel

Some sadness has no remedy. Some sadness you can't make better. — Laurie Frankel

These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could - they would - become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn't recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic. But they were her story, hers and Penn's, so however wide they wandered, they would always be right here. — Laurie Frankel

For my child, for all our children, I want more options, more paths through the woods, wider ranges of normal, and unconditional love. — Laurie Frankel

I'm so sorry because it's still not easy. You have a long, hard, terrible road ahead. There are lots of ways to travel it, but they all suck and they all involve letting go. — Laurie Frankel

Turns out fixing people up is not how we make money. It's failing to fix people up while still giving them hope that soon we might. — Laurie Frankel

Just to be with you. That's what you do for me. You simply outweigh everything else. That's how love should be, I guess. I guess, that's what love means. — Laurie Frankel

This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn't silver lining; it was a whole silver sky. — Laurie Frankel

He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings, he couldn't reach anyways. In the end though what he could give her was better than magic wands and magic frogs and magic lamps. Better and more magical. What he gave her was moral support and unconditional love. He promised to be there for her always, even times when the sky proved too vast and the night was dark because she couldn't kindle all the stars. He would light her way instead, he promised. He would be her Polaris, her celestial navigator, her astral guide. And whenever she cam back to Earth, Grumwald promised, he would be there, waiting. — Laurie Frankel

After that she'd have to go elsewhere anyway for breadth of experience. A different part of the world where she would develop expertise in more than frostbite, and lost toes, and idiots frozen to their fishing poles. But Rue, followed by Ben, followed by Rigel and Orion, had put a stop to that plan too; children being the enemies of plans and anything new besides themselves. — Laurie Frankel

Sometimes when I remember we aren't the same person, it shocks me. — Laurie Frankel

Ultimately, eventually, we let go. We do this not because we're ready. We do this not because we've mended. We do this not because we've mourned and come to terms and gotten over it and moved on. We never move on. We don't let go so much as lose our grip and fall because remembering is not enough..memory is imperfect. It is full of holes. It is more space than matter, like lace. It is at once sodden with sorrow and desiccated from lack of blood flow, the obvious result of a broken heart. It makes things up in hopeless attempts to comfort itself. It fills fissure with fantasy. It screws shut its eyes and balls up its fists and flings itself to the ground in a kicking, screaming, blind-rage temper tantrum against reality. But mostly,..memory keeps taking on more. — Laurie Frankel

This is what Grandma was worried about, you know.'
'Me eating a whole chocolate cake practically all by myself in a single sitting?'
'You falling in love with a computer geek. Sure, they have good stock options and smokin' hot bods, but what about that dark side of genius that reanimates the dead? — Laurie Frankel

Who people think they are and what people think they want is not really who they are or what they want. — Laurie Frankel

Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important that we all pretend -- make believe -- it is. One way or another books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge. — Laurie Frankel

There was nothing yet to fear, and so he passed it off as joy, as heart-pounding, pulse-quaking joy. Not as a premonition. Not as the moment to grab her hand and turn and run. — Laurie Frankel

There are few children more treasured than ill-behaved ones who belong to someone else. — Laurie Frankel

If you give all your worry to one thing, soon you'll realize that's way too much and worry about it less and you'll feel more in control of it for keeping it at the front of your mind and that will help you worry less too. — Laurie Frankel

Yeah, but you're lucky, Janey, he said. You have so many good friends. You have people to do stuff with. You have more friends than time to hang out with them, and they're all near you. Finding love is easy- it's fate- you just sit back and let it happen, have faith that if it hasn't yet, it will soon, but then that's done, and you realize you're on your own for the rest of your life. It's up to you to make the rest of it happen because destiny is done with you, at least as far as your social life goes — Laurie Frankel

Feminist narrative theory notes that for most of literary history there's been an imbalance between men's and women's stories. Male characters go out into a world of infinite possibilities. Female characters either get married or die. This makes enlightened female readers such as ourselves pissed off. But however much we deconstruct the narrative, however vigilantly we plow and apply the theory and read with our skeptical, over-educated eyes, still some lessons are hard to fully internalize, and the dream of happily-ever-after love, in real life and in literature, dies hardest of all. — Laurie Frankel

Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways beyond. They — Laurie Frankel

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea. — Laurie Frankel

You have to help him see that if he's disappearing from the world, that's too high a price to pay for fitting in. He has to see how 'You shouldn't push even though you want to' isn't the same as 'You shouldn't wear a dress even though you want to. — Laurie Frankel

You can't tell people what to be, I'm afraid," said Rosie. "You can only love and support who they already are. — Laurie Frankel

This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decision on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands. Who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up - if with your incomplete contradictory information you make the wrong call - nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake. It's impossible. It's heartbreaking. It's maddening. But there's no alternative."

"Sure there is," she said.

"What?"

"Birth control. — Laurie Frankel

But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. maybe that's revisionist history. Maybe it's me making origin myths. But I can't shake the conviction that Jason's boyfriend's friend's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend changed the world. — Laurie Frankel