The Unsinkable Greta James
Jennifer E. Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Maybe the point isn't always to make things last. Maybe it's just to make them count.”
“The truth is, being a parent is mostly just reacting. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't. You give what you can. And at the end of the day, most of it is just being there.”
“It’s a particularly strange kind of loss, when something you don’t think you even want gets taken away from you.”
“It’s like that feeling of getting off a long flight and taking your first breath of fresh air. You were okay on the plane. You could breathe just fine. And you could survive like that for a pretty long time if you had to. But once you’re off, you realize you wouldn’t want to live that way forever. Not if you had a choice. I think being away did that for me. It helped me realize I hadn’t breathed—really breathed—in a very long time.”
“The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist.”
“The love part,” she says, so quietly that only Greta can hear, “is more important.”
“The crowd wasn’t huge that night, maybe a couple hundred people. But as soon as she stepped onto the stage, Greta saw that her mom was right. There she was, right up front, with her thin glasses and short gray hair and sensible shoes, beaming amid a sea of college kids and hipsters dressed mostly in black. When their eyes met, Helen smiled and lifted a small white sign. Greta was in the middle of a complicated riff, but when the song came to an end, she took a few steps forward and squinted at it, trying to make out the words. GRETA’S MOM, it said in simple block lettering.”
“Maybe the point isn’t always to make things last,” he says. “Maybe it’s just to make them count.”
“Greta finds it almost painful sometimes to think about all the different lives she could be leading, to know that every choice she’s made has meant the loss of so many other possibilities. Every day, more doors close. Without even trying, simply by moving forward, you end up doubling down on the life you’ve chosen. And the only way to survive is to commit to it fully, to tell yourself it’s the right one. But what if that’s not true?”
“the way they looked at each other, like each thought they were the luckier one.”
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Book Keywords:
parenting, showing-up, relationships
