Abigail Thomas

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.

It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies.

For better or for worse, but not for lunch,...

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.

Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.

She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. "The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me," I say to Catherine."Yes, Mom." she says, "I know, Your memories are my memories now.