Top 100 Lisa Unger Quotes
#1. You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you'll always hear them calling your name.
Lisa Unger
#2. There's nothing particularly dark in my past ... I live in the light. My disposition is basically happy. I have a good life.
Lisa Unger
#3. Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.
Lisa Unger
#4. Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)
Lisa Unger
#5. 'In Cold Blood' is not a thriller at all, really. It is, however, the first work of its kind: a true crime book that reads like fiction.
Lisa Unger
#6. What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn't mean that you're saying it's all right now, or that you've forgotten the wrong. It just means that you've drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn't hurt as much. That's all.
Lisa Unger
#7. Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer.
Lisa Unger
#8. Ah, gym class. Remember it? Institutionally sanctioned torture for society's misfits.
Lisa Unger
#9. It was human nature to see only what you want to see, and nothing would change that, no matter what tools people had at their disposal. The truth is only what you think it is.
Lisa Unger
#10. I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.
Lisa Unger
#11. But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.
Lisa Unger
#12. As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations.
Lisa Unger
#13. Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants whose virtues had not yet been discovered.
Lisa Unger
#14. IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.
Lisa Unger
#15. Fear holds on. Love lets go. "Yes,
Lisa Unger
#16. Bored people looked for drama and caused trouble.
Lisa Unger
#17. I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer.
Lisa Unger
#18. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks.
Lisa Unger
#19. Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.
Lisa Unger
#20. The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths - a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism - with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We
Lisa Unger
#21. Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case - once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be.
Lisa Unger
#22. Wasn't there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death?
Lisa Unger
#23. We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?
Lisa Unger
#24. Judgment is such a useful shield, isn't it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate.
Lisa Unger
#25. Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator?
Lisa Unger
#26. The years grew over that embrace like a vine.
Lisa Unger
#27. Honestly, it's the most you can ask of men sometimes. They're so wound up, so buried beneath layers of "boys don't cry," and "pussy," and "man up," that they don't even know how to feel about anything. I should know.
Lisa Unger
#28. It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.
Lisa Unger
#29. Anyone who used the word hip probably wasn't.
Lisa Unger
#30. The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
Lisa Unger
#31. Love, a promise delivered already broken.
Lisa Unger
#32. Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul - often just the opposite.
Lisa Unger
#33. Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.
Lisa Unger
#34. The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn't it?
Lisa Unger
#35. The universe conspires to reveal the truth and to make your path easy if you have the courage to follow the signs.
Lisa Unger
#36. In the end it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them-that's where you have control over your life.
Lisa Unger
#37. But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life.
Lisa Unger
#38. Every couple starts off loving each other, don't they? It's how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.
Lisa Unger
#39. If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist.
Lisa Unger
#40. People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice.
Lisa Unger
#41. When our actions and choices are based on fear and denial ... Well, nothing good can come of that. Ever.
Lisa Unger
#42. He didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed.
Lisa Unger
#43. The truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again.
Lisa Unger
#44. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form.
Lisa Unger
#45. things disappear and are never found simply because there's too much ground to cover.
Lisa Unger
#46. I'm a 'bound book' kind of girl. I have a Kindle, and I enjoy it for some things, like convenience or instant gratification, or all the little things that you can do with them.
Lisa Unger
#47. Eloise thought that justice was a funny thing. It was a big idea, a romantic one. It was imagined like a satisfying end to a story.
Lisa Unger
#48. It was the dawn of a new day that Birdie prized. It was God's little reminder that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises.
Lisa Unger
#49. I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again - rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself.
Lisa Unger
#50. It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness.
Lisa Unger
#51. Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?
Lisa Unger
#52. Some bolts and then a door opened onto Eleventh
Lisa Unger
#53. When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.
Lisa Unger
#54. Even if someone is overcome with rage, it takes amazing arrogance to kill.
Lisa Unger
#55. Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.
Lisa Unger
#56. Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. - John Milton, Paradise Lost
Lisa Unger
#57. Choices turned to consequences, opinions turned to judgments, and admiration turned to envy. Envy curdled everything, like lemon in milk.
Lisa Unger
#58. In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did.
Lisa Unger
#59. Or she could listen to that other voice, the voice that wasn't a voice but something so deep, so indivisible from her own consciousness that it didn't have sound.
Lisa Unger
#60. There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.
Lisa Unger
#61. Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma.
Lisa Unger
#62. Motherhood was an ever widening circle of good-byes.
Lisa Unger
#63. I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.
Lisa Unger
#64. You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can't hide from the people who changed your diapers.
Lisa Unger
#65. I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use.
Lisa Unger
#66. In my research about the patient-therapist relationship, as well as the particular
Lisa Unger
#67. I was always the observer, trying to understand what was going on. I was always the new kid. Writing became my safe place.
Lisa Unger
#68. For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They're charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.
Lisa Unger
#69. I loved him so much. It didn't change all the reasons we couldn't be together, but it kept me returning to his body, kept my skin seeking his skin over and over again in the sad dance we did.
Lisa Unger
#70. Eloise knew that it was so much more complicated than that. There are no trades in this life, and depression is a dark, dark doorway some people have no choice but to walk through.
Lisa Unger
#71. I think that's the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we've made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions.
Lisa Unger
#72. Maybe that's all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn't. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.
Lisa Unger
#73. Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping.
Lisa Unger
#74. Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
Lisa Unger
#75. Love accepts. Forgiveness comes in time.
Lisa Unger
#76. When they're small, they're part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want them to feel safe and free to explore the world, you have to let them go. Mostly.
Lisa Unger
#77. Give up, she wanted to tell them. You lost. The world is crap, and no amount of communicating is going to change it.
Lisa Unger
#78. It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.
Lisa Unger
#79. I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
Lisa Unger
#80. She'd spun a web around Maggie's son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There
Lisa Unger
#81. Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that?
Lisa Unger
#83. We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones
Lisa Unger
#84. But then again, we're all on death row, aren't we? Most of us just don't know it.
Lisa Unger
#85. You cannot hope for change in others, you can only work toward it in yourself. And that's hard work.
Lisa Unger
#86. She wanted to take those words back. But they were out, shattering in the air all around them, slicing them both.
Lisa Unger
#87. What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.
Lisa Unger
#88. We can't hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.
Lisa Unger
#89. That's what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most
Lisa Unger
#90. There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.
Lisa Unger
#91. He's dead, Annie. But as long as you haven't dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he'll live on. We'll always have to face these times when you think he's returned for you. You'll never be free." It
Lisa Unger
#92. But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.
Lisa Unger
#93. Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen.
Lisa Unger
#94. Once you've started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can't turn back. The universe doesn't allow it.
Lisa Unger
#95. You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.
Lisa Unger
#96. An awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world.
Lisa Unger
#97. You were never so acutely aware of your own flaws as you were in the presence of your child. Why was that? The
Lisa Unger
#98. People who stay in the same town with the same friends for their entire lives never get a chance to find out who they can really be, because they will always be considered as who they were.
Lisa Unger
#99. Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe.
Lisa Unger
#100. Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another.
Lisa Unger
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