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This was the hardest part about a marriage, or a relationship like theirs: your hopes and your fears and your happiness hinged on someone else. When you stopped thinking that they ought to, you ended up like her parents, bitter and angry and apart.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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It seemed to Alice that everyone these days was out for themselves. The sort of families she and Daniel had grown up in and tried to carry on no longer existed, not really. Her mother had had eight children, including the two babies that died. Daniel's mother had had ten. Though she had hated the noise and the chaos and the sacrifice this implied back then, now Alice saw that it gave you something, being part of a family like that.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
1efc503
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Like Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
9029643
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Well, Chrissy, I'm afraid your grandmother's Irish Alzheimer's has gotten quite advanced - she's forgotten everything but her grudges.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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She and Gerald rarely argued, and when they did, she quickly nipped it in the bud, silently reciting an Ogden Nash poem entitled "A Word to Husbands," though she thought it applied to just as well to wives: To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up."
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
534ac12
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People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent half their lives just trying to hold it together.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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for everything that was wrong with men.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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A child had no choice but to forgive.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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No one can ever know the inner parts of anyone else's marriage. It's a strange business.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
44ef14d
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She had made a choice and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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Vielleicht war das Bild, das die eigene Familie von einem hatte, zu sehr mit ihren Hoffnungen und Angsten vermischt, als dass sie einen jemals wirklich als die Person sehen konnten, die man war.
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identity
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
32db55a
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He existed, then he didn't. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer. The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter's food and drinking water...
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
ea283ca
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After all this time, she still had not grown accustomed to the American obsession with air-conditioning. Every store and subway car had it-an ecological disaster, but an apparent necessity for American comfort.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
2c2be5b
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You should call your brother and congratulate him on the new job, her father might say over the phone, and it would take Kate a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Brother? She didn't have a brother.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
4b5f1a9
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Through centuries and across cultures, women were intimidated and coerced into marriage through horrible means-kidnapping, physical violence, even gang rape. In eighteenth -century England, the doctrine of coverture dictated that a woman had no legal rights within a marriage, other than those afforded her by her husband. Early American laws replicated this idea, and did not change until the 1960's. Before then, most states had "head and mas..
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
587be73
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He was forty-five
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
722dd2e
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Each of Nora's children had arrived on this earth as him- or herself. The more she knew them, the more she felt it to be true. They were so different from one another, and from her.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
2328e89
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Her faith that love was everything in the end, even if it was an imperfect love, a love that depended on memory, on some former version of who they
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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Men made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day.
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J. Courtney Sullivan |
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awake. James would force himself to close his eyes. For the next few hours, he'd lie there, thrashing around, trying to get comfortable. By morning,
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J. Courtney Sullivan |