Abigail Thomas

“Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.”

“Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.”

“The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. "The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me," I say to Catherine."Yes, Mom." she says, "I know, Your memories are my memories now.”

“It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.”

“After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.”

“For better or for worse, but not for lunch,...”