Deb Caletti Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

Love." She looked at me with those blue eyes. "Isn't it astonishing how confused and complicated such a small, simple word is? It attracts so many other things, doesn't it, that stick to it like barnacles on rock...fear, guilt. Need. You can't even see the rock anymore. I imagine love in its purest form is a rare thing.

Deb Caletti

This is not to say I don't feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It's just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

Deb Caletti

Maybe I was being too picky. Maybe I didn't want to be close to anyone. Maybe I'd just be the type who couldn't feel love all the way or something. I couldn't tell what was wrong, but what was wrong was that it just wasn't right.

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

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.

Deb Caletti

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Deb Caletti

Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all.

Deb Caletti

I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted.

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

It's a simple truth that a secret is something you're ashamed of.

Deb Caletti

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

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

You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.

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

Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you're not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don't have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.

Deb Caletti

We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.

Deb Caletti

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

Deb Caletti

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

Deb Caletti

I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.

Deb Caletti

It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear.

Deb Caletti

The favorite game of temperamental people is Try to Guess Why I'm Ticked Off. (Contestant number one, Why do YOU think he's pissed off? Why, I'm not sure, Bob, but I'm going to go with 'Because I Left the Faucet Dripping.' BEEP. I'm sorry, that's incorrect. The correct answer is: 'Because You Happen to Exist.')

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

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

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

Deb Caletti

I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent's secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things.

Deb Caletti

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

Deb Caletti

We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.

Deb Caletti

I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

Deb Caletti

Sometimes I've even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.

Deb Caletti

Rejection, though—it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.

Deb Caletti