The Echo Wife
Sarah Gailey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”
“He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”
“Why would you ever cut the blooms off the rosebush? It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it.”
“No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.”
“There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.”
“The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the tempting thing was an ongoing one,”
“Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating.”
“Twice in my life now, I have buried myself in finery. Twice, I have arranged myself within a great compilation of fabric to prove that I understand the importance of a moment. It's clothing as contrition - a performance of beauty I have to put on to pay penance to the people gathered to acknowledge me. They are here to see me. And I must apologize for requesting their attention. Must make up for the weight of my demand by ensuring that looking at me will be a pleasant thing. Never mind the suffocation of the outfit, never mind the expense, never mind the impracticality. The transaction must be made. My efforts at beauty in exchange for their regard. And so, twice in my life, I have worn the cost of that recognition.”
“If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.”
“My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again—to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted.”
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Book Keywords:
stress, falling-out-of-love, award-show, anger, gardening, pain, relief, carry-burdens, expectations-of-women, beauty-standards, growth, guilt, hurt, struggles-in-life
