Top 45 Abigail Thomas Quotes
#1. Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.
Abigail Thomas
#2. 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.
Abigail Thomas
#3. Wonderful news, a lovely day, but I don't trust good news and I don't like good weather. Dread has been my faithful companion, and without it I am alone.
Abigail Thomas
#4. Happy," for instance, once meant "luck." Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.
Abigail Thomas
#5. I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.
Abigail Thomas
#6. looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen?
Abigail Thomas
#7. If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed.
Abigail Thomas
#8. And this is my most selfish thought, that if I lose the people I love what is left of my own life will consist only of grief.
Abigail Thomas
#9. Suffering is the finest teacher", said an old friend long ago. "It teaches you details.
Abigail Thomas
#12. Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.
Abigail Thomas
#13. Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell. We talk too much.
Abigail Thomas
#14. It's easy now - it's middle-aged lady, nobody's looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It's a life with fewer distractions, but should something beautiful show up, a middle-aged woman is free to stare.
Abigail Thomas
#15. It's easy to find that five or six hours have sped by without my noticing. I am having fun. This is not my world, these are not my fears. Supernatural is great storytelling, and it is not my story.
Abigail Thomas
#16. Here's what I love about dogs. They aren't careful not to disturb you. They don't overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I'm not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection.
Abigail Thomas
#17. I was in love with a poet. "I'm in it for the pleasure," I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. "I'm in it for the pain," he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.
Abigail Thomas
#18. I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.
Abigail Thomas
#19. Don't worry," I say, putting a PG Tips tea bag in her mug. "It's been happening for years. It's not getting worse. Besides, I'm not hearing voice, I'm overhearing them. I just don't know what they are saying.
Abigail Thomas
#21. I tried not to think of this as an omen, but unwelcome thoughts enter my head all the time.
Abigail Thomas
#22. You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.
Abigail Thomas
#23. There are those people who can eat one piece of chocolate, one piece of cake, drink one glass of wine. There are even people who smoke one or two cigarettes a week. And then there are people for whom one of anything is not even an option.
Abigail Thomas
#24. The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I'm connecting to him. The insatiably curious part.
Abigail Thomas
#25. He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse
Abigail Thomas
#26. But when it gets dark, I'm off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I'm free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.
Abigail Thomas
#27. If it isn't life and death, it isn't life and death.
Abigail Thomas
#28. Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.
Abigail Thomas
#29. But they were writers and writers suggest things just to see what happens next.
Abigail Thomas
#30. What can come? my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.
Abigail Thomas
#31. Even when there's no interest on either side one's coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty (Abigail's daughter, Jen)
Abigail Thomas
#32. It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your own shoulder.
Abigail Thomas
#33. 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;
Abigail Thomas
#34. I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.
Abigail Thomas
#35. He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.
Abigail Thomas
#36. Why does forgiveness irritate me so much?" I ask Chuck.
"Because it's the ultimate act of passive aggression," he says.
"Because it keeps sin alive," says my sister.
Abigail Thomas
#37. There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning.
Abigail Thomas
#38. Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong?
Abigail Thomas
#39. Being cautious is new territory; my specialty was leaping, not looking. These days I pay attention. You can stumble uphill as easily as down. Ice comes in smooth and corrugated. Plastic bags are slippery underfoot. A big dog can knock you to your knees.
Abigail Thomas
#40. But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing
Abigail Thomas
#41. There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.
Abigail Thomas
#42. Death is both a certainty and an unknown, Chuck says. It's hard to get a grip on it.
Abigail Thomas
#43. I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.
Abigail Thomas
#44. The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won't let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.
Abigail Thomas
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top