Quotes by Jennifer duBois

Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims families--but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you wont be tainted by the aggressors sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you wont be touched by the victims pain.

When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been.

Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

Sometimes there are things we dont understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that wed never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldnt know.

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose.

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mothers horror, and hed clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.Christ, did we, said Maureen. So many lessons.So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lilys every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.

Theres an intimacy in listening to somebodys lies, Ive always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.

Thats an applicable life less, my boy, hed said. Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people dont really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They cant believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

But I find something compelling in the games choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.

It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.