Melanie Benjamin Quotes

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

What very mysterious things days were. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours. There's quite a lot we don't know about them.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren't explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.

There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.

Why, then, did I always feel as if his happiness was my responsibility? It wasn't fair for him to burden me with that. It had never been fair.

I suppose at some point, we all have to decide which memories - real or otherwise - to hold on to, and which ones to let go.

Why were there so many barriers between us, always? Barriers of clothing, of etiquette, of time and age and reason.

Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.

Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead I would define it.

I like to imagine the "what ifs" of history.

Wonderland was all we had in common, after all; Wonderland was what was denied the two of us. I had denied him his; he had denied me mine.

Would my son love me, when he was old enough to know what love meant?p 181

Now and adult, allowed a glimpse of these first cracks in my family's perfect surface, I couldn't help but wonder what else I didn't understand about us all.p 60