Caletti Quotes & Sayings

There's grief and then there's the loneliness of grief. The way it's just yours and yours alone. — Deb Caletti

Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains. — Deb Caletti

I don't know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net. — Deb Caletti

I don't stop to imagine home and the people in it, because this is so far from home, I am another person entirely. — Deb Caletti

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter. — Deb Caletti

Family was even a bigger word than I imagined, wide and without limitations, if you allowed it, defying easy definition. You had family that was supposed to be family and wasn't, family that wasn't family but was, halves becoming whole, wholes splitting into two; it was possible to lack whole, honest love and connection from family in lead roles, yet to be filled to abundance by the unexpected supporting players. — Deb Caletti

Once an asshole, always an asshole. — Deb Caletti

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. — Deb Caletti

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love. — Deb Caletti

When the story gets sad and terrible, when there are too many mistakes to count, hang on for the beautiful parts. Wait for them. Have some faith they'll arrive. This is also precisely the point: the hanging on. The waiting, the faith. — Deb Caletti

Often, marriage was solitude, with company. — Deb Caletti

Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes. — Deb Caletti

A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. — Deb Caletti

It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant. — Deb Caletti

People can attach themselves to something
an idea, another person, a desire
with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thing. Will
it's supposed to be a good treat, a more determined and persistent version of determination and persistence. But will and obsession
they sit right next to each other. They pretend to be strangers and all the while meet secretly at midnight. - — Deb Caletti

I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn't a final destination. You don't one day get there and get to stay. — Deb Caletti

More than anything, I like just being there while he works, doing what he knows to do, in his own place. — Deb Caletti

Knowledge was a personal life preserver you could always count on when you were swimming in the deep end — Deb Caletti

There was no question that it was a necessary divorce, but that didn't make it less painful. You don't think it will hurt, leaving a marriage like that, do you? But it's the same misguided thinking that makes people ask, after your mother dies, how old she was. If she was ninety, the bereavement isn't supposed to be as crushing. But of course it is. Of course. There's no equation for loss. — Deb Caletti

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get. — Deb Caletti

He was like one great big Sunday afternoon
the kind where you stay in your PJs and watch movies and eat popcorn. Where life is at it's uncomplicated best. — Deb Caletti

If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i'm the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me. — Deb Caletti

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them. — Deb Caletti

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same. — Deb Caletti

But then there are the van Goghs and Hemingways and Mozarts, those who feel a hunger so deep, so far down, that greatness lies there too, nestled somewhere within it. Those who get their inner voice and direction from the cool mysterious insides of the moon, and not from the earth like the rest of us. — Deb Caletti

It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package. — Deb Caletti

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding
something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing. — Deb Caletti

Dread begins to inch in. No. Dread isn't one of those subtle emotions. It moves in and takes over, and then it drips and hands, like Spanish moss. — Deb Caletti

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. — Deb Caletti

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to. — Deb Caletti

It's funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we've committed some crime. — Deb Caletti

What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military> — Deb Caletti

I've wished for things and never really had the chance ... It's time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You've got to know what you want, then ... go. — Deb Caletti

Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I'm often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I'm sure they're thinking I'm about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel guilty when I eat white bread and when I don't recycle. — Deb Caletti

And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness? — Deb Caletti

It's shocking the things we call love. — Deb Caletti

Anger has grand plans that sometimes look foolish later. — Deb Caletti

back of that woman's dress that night — Deb Caletti

Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple. — Deb Caletti

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write. — Deb Caletti

It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don't want to lose someone, even if they don't deserve our forgiveness. — Deb Caletti

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which. — Deb Caletti

The past is a good place for the past. — Deb Caletti

A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks. — Deb Caletti

Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own. — Deb Caletti

We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they choose. If they want to remind you forevermore that they exist, they will. They can reappear in a card or call or a "chance" meeting, they can remember your birthday or the day you met with some innocuous small note. No matter how little they matter in your new life, they can insist on being seen and recognized and remembered. — Deb Caletti

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true. — Deb Caletti

A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart. — Deb Caletti

Beaches, music, and car rides - they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts. — Deb Caletti

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss. — Deb Caletti

True love, even if just in your head, can make you forget how badly things actually suck. — Deb Caletti

Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, you can pile on as many as you want, but the guilt is still there, like that pea under all those mattresses. — Deb Caletti

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 roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic. — Deb Caletti

This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy. — Deb Caletti

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless — Deb Caletti

We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people who break them as private-life criminals. We think it automatically, one of those truths that just is to us: breaking a promise is a bad, bad thing. A promise can be as buoyant as whispered words or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure and untouchable when it should never be either of those things. If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be layered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those promises, and whether we like it or not, it ought to be something we can snatch back, that we should snatch back, if those rules are violated. — Deb Caletti

I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for a battle, but I finally knew that he had won. — Deb Caletti

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite - that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish the remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice. — Deb Caletti

Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think its one thing, but then its another. — Deb Caletti

Blessed books - they're a place to be alone, and no one else can come in. — Deb Caletti

Knowing takes its own time. I swear sometimes you've gotta get really, really uncomfortable before it shows up. — Deb Caletti

Each story, good and bad, short or long
from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness
they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits. — Deb Caletti

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried. — Deb Caletti

I don't want her in my car." says Jenna.
I don't want her in my life." says Michael.
I hope she chokes on her fucking Frappuccino." says Akello. — Deb Caletti

You've got an in-love feeling, but the relationship is damaging. When do you stop calling it love? — Deb Caletti

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep — Deb Caletti

You take care of the people you love, but it's true, too, that you take care of the things you own. — Deb Caletti

Your sibling, after all, is the only other person in the world who understands how fucked up your parents made you. — Deb Caletti

It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache. — Deb Caletti

I guess I was inching and crawling my way toward Elizabeth Bennett's words about unconditional love. That it was a dangerous thing without heavy doses of mutual respect. — Deb Caletti

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.'
So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up. — Deb Caletti

He's good, all right," Mom said. "But I guess there's something else. About being sure. Sure about anything. Right comes with right timing. — Deb Caletti

And because he was nice in the beginning did not mean he was a good man. — Deb Caletti

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for. — Deb Caletti

A person is never as quiet as they seem, we are thickly layered page lying upon page behind simple covers. — Deb Caletti

Hope was a beacon but it also had the strength of a bully. — Deb Caletti

Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery. — Deb Caletti

Still, past assholes could make a person feel skittish. You had to be careful. It could all suddenly be different than you thought it was. A big possible mistake could be hidden anywhere, ready to blow up everything, same as stepping on a land mine. — Deb Caletti

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away. — Deb Caletti

This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we've finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it's shut for good. — Deb Caletti

Hey," I say back. It's a Hey of Almost Forgiveness. "I've got something I want to show you. Will you come somewhere with me?" Oh, all right. As long as it's anywhere. "Okay. — Deb Caletti

Onyx is angry," Damian says. "Onyx has a right to be angry. You've got to remember, for many elephants, their life is that of a human in a war-torn country. Ravaged homes, killed relatives, separation," Damian says. Here's another thing I've learned over two months
every elephants here has a sad story. Every captive elephant's story is one of loss and separation. Something to remember every time you see happy people getting elephant rides. — Deb Caletti

A relationship could be a place to hide too. — Deb Caletti

Six? Here? he says.
Six, here. Seven, eight, nine, anywhere. — Deb Caletti

You've got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn't define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don't have to struggle to be good enough for. — Deb Caletti

I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling. — Deb Caletti

A lot of life is just surviving what happens. — Deb Caletti

We try to hold a storm in our own fist but we are not that strong. — Deb Caletti

I didn't know what I wanted to Be ... A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards ... I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win ... What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too. — Deb Caletti

I am beginning to think there are two kinds of people," she said. I waited. "Those who forgive themselves too easily but will not forgive others."
"And?" I asked.
"Those that forgive others too easily but will not forgive themselves. — Deb Caletti

Hurt is a weapon. Better weapon than most because it doesn't look like one. — Deb Caletti

So what brings you to the doctor today?"
"hmm, im afraid i have the chronic desire to save people"
"i know about that. i've got it too. maybe it's catching."
"not catching enough — Deb Caletti

Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they're so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath. — Deb Caletti

Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got tired of standing there, looking at it, feeling the heat, tired enough to finally just let go. Getting burned at last seemed better than the waiting to get burned. — Deb Caletti

Wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another. — Deb Caletti

All those maybes are just hope looking for a place to land. — Deb Caletti

Are you getting your period?" She narrows her eyes.
No! God. I hate that. I hate when every negative act is blamed on your period." Sometimes bitchiness is just bitchiness, happily unattached to anything hormonal. It should get full credit. — Deb Caletti

You look so good," I say, and s***! Oh god, that's not what I meant. S***! "It looks good. The book. — Deb Caletti

Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don't know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you've built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is not to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place is gravity and stability, where out feet can still touch ground. — Deb Caletti

We put God in front of terrifying things, and we knocked three times, and we took drugs and shopped too much and obsessed about success, so that the scary stuff would look farther away than it was. We worried, because maybe if we worried enough, it would act like a spell of safety. All those things, superstitions and addictions and anxiety, they were all about hiding from what scared the shit out of us. — Deb Caletti