Lisa Unger Quotes & Sayings

I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he'd paid an obscene sum and never wore. — Lisa Unger

The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths - a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism - with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We — Lisa Unger

It was a funny, impossible little trap of nature, motherhood. It muddled your brain with floods of hormones and sleep deprivation, kept you constantly busy tending to a million needs, had you forever thinking about the care of others. You could disappear into motherhood, forget completely that once upon a time you were an athlete, a graduate student, that you had ambitions to go into politics, change the world. That once upon a time you wanted to write. And even though motherhood wiped all that away like a cosmic eraser over the chalkboard of your life, it gave you something else - this crazy, blissful, adoring love that splits you open and redefines you from the inside out. — Lisa Unger

Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature. — Lisa Unger

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else. — Lisa Unger

Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that? — Lisa Unger

Some bolts and then a door opened onto Eleventh — Lisa Unger

Or she could listen to that other voice, the voice that wasn't a voice but something so deep, so indivisible from her own consciousness that it didn't have sound. — Lisa Unger

There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost. — Lisa Unger

She wanted to take those words back. But they were out, shattering in the air all around them, slicing them both. — Lisa Unger

Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case - once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be. — Lisa Unger

People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice. — Lisa Unger

I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again - rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself. — Lisa Unger

Wasn't there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death? — Lisa Unger

I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people. — Lisa Unger

It's a little-known fact, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make problems disappear. But of course, they can only do this as long as you're a child. When you've become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they're not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that's why so many of us take our time growing up. — Lisa Unger

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood. — Lisa Unger

Once you've started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can't turn back. The universe doesn't allow it. — Lisa Unger

When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant. — Lisa Unger

Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it. — Lisa Unger

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself. — Lisa Unger

Isn't it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on? — Lisa Unger

No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is." I — Lisa Unger

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart. — Lisa Unger

In their predictable lives, where everything — Lisa Unger

The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her. — Lisa Unger

Honestly, I tried not to think about my sister much. Or my mother. I have been guilty of doing what it takes to bury most of my memories when it comes to that- from junk food to booze to drugs, there are few poisons with which I haven't experimented. I've found a million ways to keep the demons in a comfortable, quiet stupor, lazing around on my inner couches. — Lisa Unger

Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up. — Lisa Unger

She knew him in a way that you can only know someone you love totally. Daily, she forgave his flaws, just as she knew he forgave hers. Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She — Lisa Unger

The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they reactions? Reactions to something that life had thrown at us, something we didn't choose and didn't want. Is there a difference between reaction and choice? I don't know the answer. — Lisa Unger

I live for the blank page. — Lisa Unger

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants whose virtues had not yet been discovered. — Lisa Unger

You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you'll always hear them calling your name. — Lisa Unger

I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use. — Lisa Unger

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life. — Lisa Unger

But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel — Lisa Unger

things disappear and are never found simply because there's too much ground to cover. — Lisa Unger

A child who's been injured by a parent waits her whole life for some acknowledgment of the wrong that's been done, some validation from him that her pain is real, that he's sorry and will make amends. The child will wait forever, unable to move forward, unable to forgive, without someone to acknowledge the past. In that powerlessness comes a terrible rage. — Lisa Unger

When they're small, they're part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want them to feel safe and free to explore the world, you have to let them go. Mostly. — Lisa Unger

Motherhood was an ever widening circle of good-byes. — Lisa Unger

Adopt the pace of nature, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her secret is patience. Ray — Lisa Unger

He'd been raised to give women what they wanted. 'You can fight,' his father told him. 'You can bitch. If you're a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul ... just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars.' The old man was right about that. — Lisa Unger

For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away. — Lisa Unger

When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn't been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It's been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn't it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn't it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm's way? These are the things that get you in the end. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised - yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details. Well, — Lisa Unger

The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift. — Lisa Unger

Eloise thought that justice was a funny thing. It was a big idea, a romantic one. It was imagined like a satisfying end to a story. — Lisa Unger

You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers. — Lisa Unger

Parenthood wasn't about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else's. When you loved your kids, you'd give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn't care about the other things, the ones that went away. — Lisa Unger

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present. — Lisa Unger

Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another. — Lisa Unger

When you're young it's easy to confuse passion for love. — Lisa Unger

I think that's the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we've made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions. — Lisa Unger

We have more patience for girls who act like boys than boys who act like girls. A tomboy is considered cute. One day she'll shuck her muddy jeans and put on a dress, and everyone will gasp at her beauty. They'll all laugh about her tree-climbing, frog-catching days.
But there's no such tolerance for the boy who puts on a dress, who wants a toy kitchen or a baby doll to love. Jung would say that this is because, even culturally, our anima is repressed, hated, derided. We hate our female selves. A boyish girl is perfectly acceptable. A girlish boy? Not so much. In certain places, you'd get your ass kicked, find yourself "gay-bashed." You might even get yourself killed. That's how much we hate our anima. — Lisa Unger

I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place. — Lisa Unger

Choices turned to consequences, opinions turned to judgments, and admiration turned to envy. Envy curdled everything, like lemon in milk. — Lisa Unger

I think we draw people into our lives ... It's as though we broadcast our deepest needs ... For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our own nightmares. — Lisa Unger

When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man's anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self - a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it . . . or suffering the consequences in psychic pain. — Lisa Unger

Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. — Lisa Unger

You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that? The — Lisa Unger

When you love someone, it doesn't really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. or punishment, depending on the circumstances. — Lisa Unger

I've had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it's kindness, honesty, and stability that impress me. — Lisa Unger

Said. I've heard enough. From — Lisa Unger

Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised - yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details. — Lisa Unger

Grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. — Lisa Unger

The truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again. — Lisa Unger

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are. — Lisa Unger

There is no external refuge." Meaning, you cannot look into the outer world to feel safe, to feel at peace. You cannot look without for understanding, or for justice. You must look within. I — Lisa Unger

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer. — Lisa Unger

Eloise knew that it was so much more complicated than that. There are no trades in this life, and depression is a dark, dark doorway some people have no choice but to walk through. — Lisa Unger

Love accepts. Forgiveness comes in time. — Lisa Unger

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations. — Lisa Unger

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread. — Lisa Unger

Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease. — Lisa Unger

It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness. — Lisa Unger

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn't be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he'd be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. — Lisa Unger

When we put on clothes, we're telling ourselves something, and we're communicating that something to every person we meet. — Lisa Unger

Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma. — Lisa Unger

What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires. — Lisa Unger

Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul - often just the opposite. — Lisa Unger

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life. — Lisa Unger

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone. — Lisa Unger

There were 9,780 living souls populating The Hollows. There were good people and bad ones, people with secrets and dark appetites, happy people, and people buckling under the weight of grief and sorrow. There were people who were looking for things and loved ones they had lost, and people hiding. There were lost people, trying to find their way home. Each of them was connected to the others in ways that were obvious or as hidden as the abandoned mine tunnels beneath the ground. Each had his purpose and his place in The Hollows, whether he knew it or not. Everything here had its time and its season. — Lisa Unger

The worst violence we can do to each other often is psychological, especially in families. I dwell a lot on domestic danger. That's the backdrop of most of my novels - what kind of damage is done without ever lifting a finger. — Lisa Unger

Denial: my family heritage. If you don't ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you. — Lisa Unger

'In Cold Blood' is not a thriller at all, really. It is, however, the first work of its kind: a true crime book that reads like fiction. — Lisa Unger

Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree? — Lisa Unger

Even if someone is overcome with rage, it takes amazing arrogance to kill. — Lisa Unger

We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it? — Lisa Unger

... there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went. — Lisa Unger

The universe conspires to reveal the truth and to make your path easy if you have the courage to follow the signs. — Lisa Unger

You [meaning mothers] said good-bye a little every day
from the minute they left your body until they left your home. — Lisa Unger

You cannot hope for change in others, you can only work toward it in yourself. And that's hard work. — Lisa Unger

You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family. — Lisa Unger

But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others. — Lisa Unger

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction. — Lisa Unger

I'm a 'bound book' kind of girl. I have a Kindle, and I enjoy it for some things, like convenience or instant gratification, or all the little things that you can do with them. — Lisa Unger

Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.) — Lisa Unger

But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life. — Lisa Unger

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist. — Lisa Unger