Top 100 Deb Caletti Quotes
#1. We made plans. I lay in bed for a long time just feeling delicious anticipation. Then excitement hit. I got up. I had to move a mountain or something.
Deb Caletti
#2. It's funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we've committed some crime.
Deb Caletti
#3. In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.
Deb Caletti
#4. It doesn't matter if we're young. If you love someone, and it's right ... We can make it the whole way, Crick.
Deb Caletti
#5. 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.
Deb Caletti
#6. Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
Deb Caletti
#7. 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
#8. Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.
Deb Caletti
#9. The hurt affects your ability to go forward.
Deb Caletti
#10. But I didn't want to share everything yet ... I needed that time alone with it first, that delicious time where you replay every moment, where you make what has happened more real and also less - it becomes fact the more you repeat it, but it becomes story, too.
Deb Caletti
#11. Whipped cream can remind you why it's good to be alive.
Deb Caletti
#12. Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.
Deb Caletti
#13. No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.
Deb Caletti
#14. 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 Caletti
#15. Nice is akin to not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks. It's a superstitious hedging of bets. A part of you thinks your good behavior will ward off evil. Well, apparently that's not true.
Deb Caletti
#16. You're an asshole alive, you're still an asshole dead.
Deb Caletti
#17. More than anything, I like just being there while he works, doing what he knows to do, in his own place.
Deb Caletti
#18. Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.
Deb Caletti
#19. 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
#20. Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.
Deb Caletti
#21. The first rule of marital success: Don't marry crazy and don't be crazy.
Deb Caletti
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. And because he was nice in the beginning did not mean he was a good man.
Deb Caletti
#25. Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.
Deb Caletti
#26. Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run - from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves.
Deb Caletti
#27. 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.
Deb Caletti
#28. 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 Caletti
#29. Quitting-it was a dirty word in a place where pilgrims had endured harsh winters and where pioneers had struggled through death and disease to create new lives. Giving up or stepping back or setting aside something you thought you wanted- it was almost a shameful act.
Deb Caletti
#30. All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.
Deb Caletti
#31. 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 Caletti
#32. We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.
Deb Caletti
#33. That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.
Deb Caletti
#34. It's both harder and easier without words.
Deb Caletti
#35. Funny the only two times we use the phrase "seeing someone" are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help.
Deb Caletti
#36. 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
#37. Right there - the hope of bacon is a reason to love life.
Deb Caletti
#38. But then again, a person could turn ugly. Their actual look could change when their actions were repulsive.
Deb Caletti
#39. Your sibling, after all, is the only other person in the world who understands how fucked up your parents made you.
Deb Caletti
#40. Hope was a beacon but it also had the strength of a bully.
Deb Caletti
#41. Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.
Deb Caletti
#42. 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
#43. Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.
Deb Caletti
#44. There are those moments, probably few in a life, where before and after split off from each other forevermore in your mind.
Deb Caletti
#45. Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.
Deb Caletti
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. My instinct is on target about Jenny, because she answers the phone with, "Is everything all right?"
"I've been abducted," I say.
"Aliens, I hope," she says. "We can make some money when you sell your story to the media.
Deb Caletti
#49. No, Mom. I said fine."
"It's just your tone."
Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.
Deb Caletti
#50. Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.
Deb Caletti
#51. And once again, that high, domed sky makes me feel a wide vista of emotion, and once again I could weep at an overturned chair or a torn page, or today, Larry's scruffy beard and the ink on his fingers that I can see from here.
Deb Caletti
#52. So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)
Deb Caletti
#53. But if love wasn't just yours first, it was like cutting up and handing out your birthday cake before you blew out the candles.
Deb Caletti
#54. 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.
Deb Caletti
#55. 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
#56. Look right at it. Know you can." Dad said. "Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter.
Deb Caletti
#57. If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.
Deb Caletti
#58. All those maybes are just hope looking for a place to land.
Deb Caletti
#59. You've got an in-love feeling, but the relationship is damaging. When do you stop calling it love?
Deb Caletti
#60. 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
#61. People are secretive when they have secrets.
Deb Caletti
#62. I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.
Deb Caletti
#63. Oh, the power of the delete. It felt fabulous. I wished I could go around deleting like crazy. I'd delete suspicious spots on X-rays and malls at Christmas, car troubles and tragic events in history, the world's and my own.
Deb Caletti
#64. This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy.
Deb Caletti
#65. I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath.
Deb Caletti
#66. Someone walking toward you is such a simple, happy-to-be-alive thing.
Deb Caletti
#67. Still, past assholes could make a person feel skittish. You had to be careful. It could all suddenly be different than you thought it was. A big possible mistake could be hidden anywhere, ready to blow up everything, same as stepping on a land mine.
Deb Caletti
#68. 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
#69. It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear.
Deb Caletti
#70. I smile. Not just at bad clowns, but at "library science." I like that name. It makes a library sound as vast and mysterious as the universe or the ocean, requiring specific study to be understood.
Deb Caletti
#71. 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.
Deb Caletti
#72. Beaches, music, and car rides - they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts.
Deb Caletti
#73. I understand he's not guilty of anything except maybe loving too much. This boy, he is just ... mine.
Deb Caletti
#74. The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.
Deb Caletti
#75. 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 Caletti
#76. I suppose you don't stand much if a chance if you think that happiness us the absence of unhappiness,' he said. 'Good luck ever being happy, then.
Deb Caletti
#77. I used to know a woman named Anita Hurl," Lizbeth said. "Get it? I need to hurl?
Deb Caletti
#78. So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.
Deb Caletti
#79. I guess I was inching and crawling my way toward Elizabeth Bennett's words about unconditional love. That it was a dangerous thing without heavy doses of mutual respect.
Deb Caletti
#80. Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter.
Deb Caletti
#81. My father said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what's good for you. It's your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You're an idiot if you think it means you've met your soul mate. So I was an idiot.
Deb Caletti
#82. 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 Caletti
#83. It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting-it was a dirty word ...
Deb Caletti
#85. What is it about hairdressers? You tell them 'not too short' and some part of their hairdresser brain hears this as 'whack the shit out of it.' If you never say, 'not too short,' everything is fine. You say it, & it's a guarantee you'll come out ready for the military>
Deb Caletti
#86. Maybe some people just had trouble with forever.
Deb Caletti
#87. We had a humiliating and lengthy wait at a DONT WALK sign with not a car in sight for miles. Dad was a press about jaywalking. Or maybe he just like to stare down what he'd testily called the "grammatical error sanctioned by the state." There is, of course, no apostrophe in the DONT WALK sign.
Deb Caletti
#88. Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.
Deb Caletti
#90. Even when times are dark, the darkest, even when you are sure that life as you know it is over, there are still things that last.
Deb Caletti
#91. Knowledge is so comforting, but so is mystery.
Deb Caletti
#92. Nature is never static, I understand. Change is ever-constant, clouds zipping across a sky. It is dynamic, complicated, tangled, mostly beautiful. A moving forward, something newly gained, means that something is lost, too.
Deb Caletti
#93. [A]pparently, it's okay to WORK as a waitress but not to BE a waitress.
Deb Caletti
#94. I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.
Deb Caletti
#95. Fury and devastation are fraternal twins.
Deb Caletti
#96. Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got tired of standing there, looking at it, feeling the heat, tired enough to finally just let go. Getting burned at last seemed better than the waiting to get burned.
Deb Caletti
#97. Feminism was supposed to chase away all of those embarrassing vulnerabilities. At least, you were supposed to be aware that acting helpless was something shameful. So was the tendency to hide your own fear behind the toughness of bad boys, if you had that. I had that. I'm being honest here. The
Deb Caletti
#98. When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.
Deb Caletti
#99. 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.
Deb Caletti
#100. Fate's got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It's the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think its one thing, but then its another.
Deb Caletti
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