Deb Caletti Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser...

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
Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light—a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.

Deb Caletti
A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and let go?

Deb Caletti
Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.

Deb Caletti
I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving.

Deb Caletti
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
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
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
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
I don't know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It's funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we've committed some crime.

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

Deb Caletti
The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket.

Deb Caletti
We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

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
Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once.

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

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

Deb Caletti