Deb Caletti quotes
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“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 CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2010). “The Secret Life of Prince Charming”, p.272, Simon and Schuster
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“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 CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2010). “The Secret Life of Prince Charming”, p.303, Simon and Schuster
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“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 -
“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”
-- Deb CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2009). “The Fortunes of Indigo Skye”, p.253, Simon and Schuster
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“We look down our noses at people who've made mistakes in relationships. She's so stupid! How could she do that! Our superiority makes us feel better. But I’d bet everything I have on the fact that people to claim to have a perfect record in love are either lying or have very limited dating experience. People who say, I’d never do that! Someday, unless you are very, very lucky, you’ll have a story to tell. Or not to tell.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Those questions you have? Whether he's the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you're not sure whether you're in love with someone or not, the answer is not.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Unconditional love is like a contry of two with no laws and no government. Which is all fine if everyone is peaceful and law abiding. In the wrong hands, though, you got looting and crime sprees, and let me tell you, the people who demand unconditional love are usually the ones who will rob and pillage and then blame you because you left your door unlocked.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“This is what I know. Don't settle for 40, 50, or even 80 percent. A relationship-it shouldn't be too small or too tight or even a little scratchy. It shouldn't take up space in your closet out of guilty conscience or convenience or a moment of desire. Do you hear me? It shold be perfect for you. It should be lasting. Wait. wait for 100 percent.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature--an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Love can come when you're already who you are, when you're filled with you. Not when you look to someone else to fill the empty space.”
-- Deb CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2004). “Honey, Baby, Sweetheart”, p.237, Simon and Schuster
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“The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.”
-- Deb CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2009). “The Fortunes of Indigo Skye”, p.233, Simon and Schuster
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“Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don't, and you better have it, or it's like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you dont even know at first what they're even selling. Or those menues without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don't mean money. What I'm saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point.”
-- Deb CalettiSource : "Nina Dobrev Is Our September Cover Girl!" by Laura Brounstein, www.cosmopolitan.com. August 5, 2013.
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“It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.”
-- 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 -
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“Because that’s how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.”
-- 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 CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2012). “Stay”, p.5, Simon and Schuster
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“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 -
“I finally learned that it was all right to say something wasn’t working for me when it wasn’t working. The world doesn’t come crashing down when you speak the truth.”
-- Deb CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2010). “The Secret Life of Prince Charming”, p.124, Simon and Schuster
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“Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.”
-- 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 CalettiSource : "Their Time Is Now". Interview with Philip Galanes, www.nytimes.com. February 7, 2014.
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“A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat”
-- Deb Caletti -
“If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“If fate is a shape-shifter, then loves is too. It can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It´s your best day and then your worst. It´s your most hope and then you most despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at lightning speed- a boat upon the water on the most dangerous day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the sea rages and the boat is lost.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“You've got to say what you mean and mean what you say...Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.”
-- 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 CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2010). “The Secret Life of Prince Charming”, p.61, Simon and Schuster
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“If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?”
-- Deb Caletti -
“You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I've heard that people stand in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. Place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations...Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I grow green beans in my garden. The one thing I know about harvesting them is that you need to train your eyes to see the beans. At first it all looks like leaves, until you see one bean and then another and another. If you want clarity, too, you have to look hard. You have to look under things and look from different angles. You'll see what you need to when you do that. A hundred beans, suddenly.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I've come to the conclusion that it's all about fear- fear that your kid won't come out on top, be a success. Forcing him into these brutal encounters will a) make a dame sure he is a success, and b) all you to see evidence of that success with the added bonus of a cheering crowd. This means that sports are supported with an almost desperate enthusiasm. The football team gets catered dinners before a fame. Honor Society is lucky if it gets a cupcake. Academic success-forget it. That requires too much imagination. There's no scoreboard.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“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 -
“I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first… I had to look”
-- Deb Caletti -
“The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“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 -
“Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“It’s a simple truth that a secret is something you’re ashamed of.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“What’s that about? Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn’t.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“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 -
“Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“You could care enough to keep a secret, but you could care enough to tell one, too.”
-- 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 -
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“Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn’t. People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“A person who says "it's your decision" is informing you that your decision sucks.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“A lot of life is just surviving what happens.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.”
-- 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 -
“Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?”
-- 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 -
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“Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows down like a setting sun. I never get tired of watching them and I've seen them thousands of times. I always wondered what that kind of freedom would feel like.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some authority. Like it's been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance.”
-- 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 CalettiSource : Deb Caletti (2013). “He's Gone: A Novel”, p.129, Bantam
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“Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Most people, it seems like they've only got one part of the equation down. Caring for themselves, or caring for someone else. And I'v learned how important it is to have both.”
-- 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 -
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“Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness?”
-- 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 -
“Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. Its kind of self-therapy.”
-- 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 -
“I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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“Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the Queen of Everything, I thought it was a book for adults.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all.”
-- Deb Caletti -
“When you're not sure whether you're in love with someone or not, the answer is not.”
-- Deb Caletti -
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