- "But once children develop a theory of mind, once they get that not everybody sees and knows what they do, their horizons explode. Hide-and-seek works because they don’t leave bits of themselves sticking out. Secrets become possible. Telling the truth becomes optional. And emotions get complicated. The moment you see yourself as others see you, you become self-conscious. Welcome to embarrassment and shame. And empathy. There is a bright side."
- "Isn’t that what love is, the belief that you exist in the private world of someone else’s mind as a beautiful, cherished being? Perhaps that’s the problem with love: it’s unverifiable."
- "Blind spots are one example of the guessing and filling in that go on routinely in the brain, all in the name of efficiency. The world is fairly predictable, so it makes sense for the brain to rely on expectations, to see what is usually there, and not bother to build the world from scratch every time you open your eyes. The object on the side of the highway appears to be a truck tire, not a dead body, because that’s more likely. Most of the time, the truth doesn’t matter."
- "Perhaps everyone has stories they keep in a lockbox, stories they are not willing to own much less share. But if you don’t acknowledge your own history—all of it, especially the underside—then aren’t you creating blind spots of your own?"
~ Excerpts from
Stories We Never Told, by Sonja Yoerg
- “If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to. Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”
- “That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.”
- “Sometimes it took Alex and Hellie hours, sometimes days, but they always came back. There was too much world. There were too many choices, and those only seemed to lead to more choices. That was the business of living, and neither of them had ever acquired the skill.”
-Excerpts from
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
- "Now that I’d lost you, it seemed to me the hardest thing a human would ever have to face was how to live without the person their heart was tied to. Every day I had to remind my brain and body I was never going to see you again. Remind my skin it would never feel your hands again. Remind my hands they would never touch your back as you slept. Never. I don’t think humans are really built to understand what that means. I told myself it should have been easy. All I had to do was go into my house, and shut the door, and live out the rest of my life without you."
- "When you hear stories about women who are married to serial killers – Sonia Sutcliffe, for example – or whose husbands turn out to have four other families stashed away, you always say, how could she not know? She must have known. But I realised now that some people were just so good at lying that you not only believed them, you actually did your best to. You so much want to believe that what they tell you is true, you do the lying for them."
~ Excerpts from
The Other Wife, by Claire McGowan
