Allison Winn Scotch Quotes

#1. But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

Allison Winn Scotch

#2. I'm better at life with you in it.

Allison Winn Scotch

#3. patterns repeat themselves, after all. Always.

Allison Winn Scotch

#4. I press my eyes shut and will the thoughts away. But they refuse to comply, and instead, they lodge themselves in the crevasses of my brain, poking out just enough that I know they're still with me, like a tiny splinter in your baby toe that gnaws away at you with every step you take.

Allison Winn Scotch

#5. There's always more than one path, and to think otherwise is what resigns you to fate.

Allison Winn Scotch

#6. Eventually kids become grown-ups too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.

Allison Winn Scotch

#7. motherhood is like this: a series of tiny moments that add up to an enormous love, with lots of other moments of frustration and misunderstanding and complexity woven in between.

Allison Winn Scotch

#8. My spine shoots up straight like I'd been plugged into an eight-volt, and the mere sight of him literally causes my breath to leave my body.

Allison Winn Scotch

#9. But I suppose our childhoods are seeds inside of us that plant roots forever, even when we're certain their life cycles have long since been extinguished. How long will it take for my own roots to loosen their grip?

Allison Winn Scotch

#10. That you can look back fondly or even wistfully on pieces of your life and hound yourself with endless what-ifs, but nothing will change. The present will still be the present. The future will still unfold as it's meant to.

Allison Winn Scotch

#11. What was the one moment we lost our way? Or was it a series of moments that snowballed into something larger, something intangible, something careeining forward with too much acceleration for us to stop it now?

Allison Winn Scotch

#12. There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.

Allison Winn Scotch

#13. I might have felt broken, but at the end of it all, I didn't allow myself to break.

Allison Winn Scotch

#14. You have to know ... What you have to know in all of this, through all of this, is that no matter how lost you are in this maze of hell and confusion, that in the end, I promise you, you will be found.

Allison Winn Scotch

#15. We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless.

Allison Winn Scotch

#16. Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.

Allison Winn Scotch

#17. And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I'd soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect though in far different ways.

Allison Winn Scotch

#18. The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in
one after the next.

Allison Winn Scotch

#19. I smiled sweetly and pushed up on my tiptoes, kissing him softly on his too-chapped lips, and agreed. Yes, to us.

Allison Winn Scotch

#20. I like to take inspiration from people who do things that I could never do.

Allison Winn Scotch

#21. I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing.

Allison Winn Scotch

#22. When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I'd built around myself - because, to my father's credit, he'd never asked me to captain our plagued family's ship - it all collapsed.

Allison Winn Scotch

#23. Nothing is different here and now than it used to be: The people whom I need most are gone, and the ones who remain do nothing to help me get to where I need to go. Different names, different faces, but the end result is still the same.

Allison Winn Scotch

#24. If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?

Allison Winn Scotch

#25. Jake: I'm not offering up excuses of any kind ... I was just saying that sometimes shit happens, and I don't have a choice.
Natalie: No, Jake, that's where you're wrong. Me getting cancer? True enough, I had no choice. How you treat the ones you love? Well, there, you always have a choice.

Allison Winn Scotch