Deb Caletti
And if you could make a choice, then why not pick happiness?Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Beautiful
This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling...I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere "Have fun, honey.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Queens
I vow... "to not let the back & forth of forgiveness interrupt the steadiness of love.Collection: Vow
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.Collection: Life
A dog — a dog teaches us so much about love. Wordless, imperfect love; love that is constant, love that is simple goodness, love that forgives not only bad singing and embarrassments, but misunderstandings and harsh words. Love that sits and stays and stays and stays, until it finally becomes its own forever. Love, stronger than death. A dog is a four-legged reminder that love comes and time passes and then your heart breaks.Collection: Dog
You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining...Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the same for me.Collection: Thinking
Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Advice
If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny) Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)Collection: Oxygen
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.Collection: Nice
Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.Collection: Powerful
I don't get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days...No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.Collection: School
Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.Collection: Sometimes
But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become a part of.Collection: Knowing
...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.Collection: Library
Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.Collection: Parent
I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.Collection: Perfect
Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once.Collection: Taken
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?Collection: Letting Go
We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.Collection: Syrup
But an apology too — you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.Collection: Apology
It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It’s just like Animal Planet, only we’ve got Cover Girl and Victoria’s Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom’s Half-Yearly Sale.Collection: Girl
You … You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay.Collection: Long
I mean it’s purposeful, even if we don’t realize it. The desire to put things in our path, to figure out how to finally leave the behind….Collection: Mean
This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?Collection: Believe
The hurt affects your ability to go forward.Collection: Hurt
Beaches, music, and car rides—they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts.Collection: Beach
... But then again, a person could turn ugly. Their actual look could change when their actions were repulsive.Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Pain
Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.Collection: Impossible
Ive never met a popcorn ball I didnt like.Collection: Popcorn
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.Collection: Book
What Dino spent most of his time doing was hiring and firing new managers. Since he ditched William Tiero three-plus years ago, he just want through these poor guys like you go through a bag of M&M's when you've got your period. Consume, and on the the next.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Book
...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.Collection: Fire
I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throatCollection: Heart
Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.Collection: Empty
Sometimes that´s all you need…, to know it´s not broken. To know you’re still whole and that you’ll heal.Collection: Broken
Look right at it. Know you can." Dad said. "Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter.Collection: Dad
At the root of every large struggle in life is the need to be honest about something that we do not feel we can be honest about. We lie to ourselves or other people because the truth might require action on our part, and action requires courage. We say we “don’t know” what is wrong, when we do know what is wrong; we just wish we didn’t. Art lets us tell the truth, but even art can be something to hide behind.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Lying
My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.Collection: Language
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.Collection: Anchors
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 lookCollection: Loyalty
she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't doCollection: Regret
It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache.Collection: Made
We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.Collection: Giving