How to Forget: A Daughter's Memoir
Kate Mulgrew
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone.”
“It had taken thirty years for me to understand that regrets do not dissipate, they do not abate into sadness—they harden until they have formed into a small fist that often rests quietly in the pit of your stomach but that can suddenly, and without warning, land a punch so powerful you are left doubled over in pain, gasping for breath.”
“With our father dead and our mother lost, we surviving siblings became unmoored. Unusual behaviors revealed themselves at inauspicious times. Simmering beneath the surface of our loneliness was a kind of inarticulable fury, reducing each of us to a meanness we despised. We longed to reach out to one another, but at every turn this instinct was thwarted, tangled in a web of suspicion and resentment. As much as we had loved one another in the fullness of life, we hated what we had become when that wholeness was eclipsed by loss. Mendacity, jealousy, and rage percolated on the back burner while egoism masqueraded as generosity. In our confusion, we second-guessed one another, and because we never learned to confront each other with frank vulnerability, we fell back into the roles assigned to us at birth.”
“Whatever ill we bore one another, it was always within the accepted confines of sibling rivalry, but in the absence of parents to inspire that rivalry we lost confidence in ourselves, and in our love for one another. We fought for life to continue as it had always been, we fought for our right to be in the house that we loved, we fought for stature, for respect, for equality.”
“The one thing that has set us apart had been taken from us, and thought we would joke again, and tease, and strive to recover a flavor of the old exuberance, we would never again laugh as we once had.”
“So many memories have dissipated in the mind-blunting of that period, when every thought, every feeling, every action was born out of intense anxiety.”
“Ours was a bond without resilience. We had not fought for a friendship, we had not suffered because of the lack of one. We had taken wildly divergent paths and, in so doing, we had lost each other.”
“It is only an organ, the brain, just as the heart is only an organ, and hearts will stop when they have been broken. We give full marks to the broken heart but are less tolerant of the broken mind.”
“I thought again about the miracle of time, its manifest cruelty and sublime mercy.”
“How is it that words so longed for can hit and miss with equal acuity?”
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Book Keywords:
homesickness, amnesia, time, recalibrating, grief, irrevocable-loss, double-standard, regret, grown-apart, double-edged-sword
