Erica Bauermeister Quotes

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

Caroline had felt more comfortable thinking of beauty as something separate from her, like a scarf or a coat you could check before going in to a show. She wondered now, however, if she had treated more things as a part of herself rather than an accessory, perhaps everything would have turned out differently.

Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.

It was interesting. Isabelle thought, the children that chose you. Some come through your body; others came in cars in the middle of the night.

TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything-at which point, the process would start all over.

She found herself wondering at what point in her life she had ceased to be Gulliver and had become the strings holding him to the ground.

You know," Marion said, "I met a woman once when I was a teenager. I knew she had gone through a lot but she was so strong, so compassionate. I asked her how she could be the way she was, and you know what she told me?"

Hadley shook her head.

"She said, 'You can be broken, or broken open. That choice is yours.

She simply didn't have an interest in men anymore. It wasn't that she didn't like them, she just knew how easily they broke.