Bomb Shelter Philpott Quotes

As far as I can tell, the uncertain part is every second we’re alive, until the last.

Better to believe the world is at least half-full of decent intentions than to focus on how it’s also half-full of assholes.

Loving a teenager is just as emotionally intoxicating as loving a baby. Maybe even more.

When you’re an adult who thinks your own churning mind is what keeps everything safe, it’s called anxious.)

Sometimes time moves quickly and sometimes it moves slowly, but it always moves forward. This is not your life forever.

When we begin things, we can’t possibly know how they will end. Everything we plan is built on guesses and hopes, never on certainty. It’s a wonder anybody ever starts anything.

I don’t think, This is my life right now. I think, This is my life forever. I panic. I forget, although I’ve learned it countless times, that every stage of life changes, then ends.

Life can’t be all beginnings, but I am still a little stuck on the fact that I don’t want my people to go. I’m a little stuck on the idea that what I want has anything to do with anything.

I used to think babyhood was the neediest stage of life, but teenagers need their parents just as much—maybe even more. A baby needs a snuggle, some eye contact, a song. A teenager needs a trusted adult to talk things out with when they or a friend gets into a scary situation.

We take care of who we can and what we can, near and far, because that’s the job. That is life. It’s true: There will always be threats lurking under the water where we play, danger hiding in the attic and rolling down the street on heavy wheels, unexpected explosions in our brains and our hearts and the sky. There will always be bombs, and we will never be able to save everyone we care about. To know that and to try anyway is to be fully alive. The closest thing to shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give it.

am a person who trusts data and loves information and feels soothed by sorting things. I’m a person who sees cause for delight everywhere but can’t stop noticing danger everywhere, too, and who often struggles to reconcile the two. I’m a person who takes every personality test despite knowing her own personality very well, and then retakes them until she gets the label she wants.

How hard would it be to repurpose the old smoking lounges and designate a space where people can go to break down for whatever reason? A crying lounge could be stocked with cold beverages, soft chairs, windows to stare out of, large sunglasses in a range of sizes, fresh waterproof mascara, and friendly, quiet dogs of varying fluffiness. It could be centrally located but closed off, separate from the rest of the airport, just like time and space in the air are separate from time and space on the ground. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a place where we could privately fall to pieces and then get ourselves together? Instead, we have to do it out in the open.

Sometimes I don’t know how any of us go on. Sometimes I fear there’s no way our species will survive our own self-destructive choices. Sometimes I feel so gut punched by the backward deal of the universe—that if you’re really lucky, you get people in your life to love, and then, over time, they will all either leave you or die—that I am angry at life. Actually, not sometimes. Always. I always feel that way. I don’t always actively think about it, but it’s in there. At the same time, I am always looking for some gratitude, warmth, or hope. I often have to really search for it, but when I see something that makes me feel joy—even just a tiny odd hardly anything—you’re damn right I applaud it. Way to go, adorable cat on a leash! Thank you, server who brought my hot pizza! Kudos, writers of a TV show that made me laugh! Hallelujah, sunshine after a week of storms! Yay for a good hair day, yippee for hot coffee, huzzah for an outfit that puts bounce in my step. If I can scrape up some evidence of a thing made beautifully or a gesture made kindly, then I can believe, for a few seconds, that this world is careful and kind. And if I can believe that, I can believe it is safe to let the people I love walk around out there. It’s my own attempt at foresparkling, seeking out hints of good, even planting them myself, so I can believe there’s more good to come. It might all be superstition, just mental magic, but why not try?

The kind of “home” I craved was a feeling, not a place. A sense of safety and wholeness, of good intentions and predictable outcomes, or, at the very least, the comfort of togetherness when things fall apart.

obviously you want your birds to learn to fly? What if you want them to go, because you want them to have full lives, but you also, simultaneously and secretly and impossibly, want them to stay by your side forever?

Too young to articulate it, I was beginning to understand for the first time what would later, in other circumstances, hit me harder: that time was a finite resource. The more time you had in life, if you were lucky, the more opportunities you had to love people and be loved, and then, at a certain point, the tide would turn, and time would start to run out, taking the ones you love with it.

The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After School Specials, and CBS called their version Schoolbreak. NBC went with Special Treat, which, given the content of these shows, strikes me now as darkly comic. I rarely managed to watch one of these programs in its entirety because I wasn’t allowed to turn on the television during homework time, but occasionally I’d sneak a half hour. They ranged from mild domestic drama, like “Divorced Kids’ Blues,” to more sensational stories, such as “Are You My Mother?,” in which a girl finds out the mom she thought was dead is actually alive and in some kind of institution. Then there were episodes like these: “One Too Many”—one of several specials about drunk-driving accidents. “Don’t Touch”—a variation on the theme that abuse can come at you from any direction: a sitter, a parent, an uncle, a family friend… (See also, and I swear I’m not making this up: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.”) “Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy”—What happened to Andrea when she accepted a ride from a stranger? Well, it wasn’t good at all, I can tell you that. “A Very Delicate Matter”—Guess what? The matter is gonorrhea. “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend”—Answer: as soon as you notice their interest in cocaine.

The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind, too—and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t hold on to anything, even your own face, which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time. But maybe that’s the job of our faces, to help us get used to letting go.

I don’t have to find a way to live with something I’m not required to live with. I don’t have to buy into something that doesn’t really have value to me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m such a worrier because the tough outer shell around the softness of my soul never hardened all the way up.

For John and me, every detail of that early morning was seared into our minds. But our son had no memory of it. He wanted to understand, to remember something, so he kept asking us to describe it to him: What did we hear? What did we see? What was the inside of the ambulance like? We described the scene as best we could—“you were here on the floor, son; this is where we found you”—leaving out the parts no child wants to hear their parents say: We left our bodies. We bargained with God. I did not say, I knew when I saw your feet that the universe had come to take you from me, and that I had known without really knowing that this was coming. I didn’t mention that the more I remembered, the more I was sure that here on earth my hands may have been dialing 911 and my voice may have been asking for help, but somewhere on another plane I was standing at the mouth of a fiery tunnel, holding my arms out like a shield, pushing back flames with my hands and screaming, NO, STAY BACK, LEAVE HIM HERE. I didn’t explain that I went to war with the universe then, that I squared off against Life, which is also Death, that I threw my body between them and him. I remember these scenes like I remember running down the hall, as if they all happened, equally real. All that is hard to explain to someone so young.

We all exist to one another as snippets of witnessed behavior. Everything we’ve ever done, no matter how true or false to our nature, makes us the kind of person who does that thing—at least to anyone who was there for it.

Creative types are always talking about “world building.” When a screenwriter or novelist tells a story, they have to both create and adhere to the rules of the world in which their story takes place. I think we do that in our minds as well. We create worlds. As soon as you decide to project your misery onto someone else, you start building a grudge world. Every time you visit it, you lay another brick. I think some people build grudges up in such detail that their grudge worlds become too big and too real. They stop living in the actual world and begin living full-time in a universe built by resentment and anger. The grudge turns into something dark and obsessive. And when a person confuses a grudge with a real problem, they may start making real-world decisions using grudge-world logic. They think they really hate people they don’t even know.

Every morning I put a pitcher in the refrigerator to get nice and cold. Sometimes I threw in a few slices of lemon and cucumber to make it taste vaguely medicinal and self-congratulatory. People on the internet called this spa water, but I thought of it as smug water.

My birthday, to me, is a chance to say, "Thank you for having me," to the earth and everyone on it.

What is a bomb shelter but either practice for something that will never happen or a postponement of the inevitable?

It would only be a problem if we told you it was a problem, baby.

There’s an almost inevitable failure built into caring for two people during a moment when one is in crisis and one is not.

A hardening happens to human souls as we come to accept terrible things as normal

I keep mentioning television. Remember: There was no internet in the 1980s. What a child knew of the world was what immediately surrounded her in real life—her own family, friends, school, and home—and what glimpses she could get of the larger world through available windows. Television filled in the blanks, I thought, in my understanding of life. I had no way of knowing how many blanks remained unfilled or how correct or incorrect was the mental map I drew of the world based on that understanding. The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After

You can see how a kid might wonder, How will I ever be ready for all this?

(When you are a child who believes your brain can keep planes from crashing, it’s imaginative and precocious. When you’re an adult who thinks your own churning mind is what keeps everything safe, it’s called anxious.)

Reading became a scavenger hunt. Of course, sad books had the most foreshadowing; that’s why it was called foreshadowing and not foresparkling

All I had to do was be still and let the music play.

John does a funny thing in traffic. If someone cuts him off or veers in and out of his lane and he ends up next to them at a stoplight, he cranes his neck sideways and glares at them. It’s as if he’s scolding them with his facial expression, like they’ll sense his eyes on them and think, Why is that man looking at me? Oh, it must have been the way I was tailing his car back there. What a mistake I’ve made! The regrets! How will I live with myself? In reality, the other driver never notices. John is wasting his energy, wanting some kind of revenge he’s not going to get. It’s one

There will always be bombs, and we will never be able to save everyone we care about. To know that and to try anyway is to be fully alive. The closest thing to shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give

The amount of time that elapsed between my two-year-old self toddling along the National Mall waving a flag and my eighteen-year-old self moving into a dorm feels vast to me, but I know now how time moves when you're grown-up, and I know those years must have gone much faster for my parents than for me. To my dad, hardly any time at all passed between when the siren called him into the bunker and when he started packing boxes full of shelf-stable food to send to his baby at college.

Having a body means taking care of yourself in all the usual ways, plus whatever extra way might be required by your particular thing [...] Everybody has something, and most things araen't so bad. All that's true, but there's more to it. You don't get to choose what your thing is, whether you get just one thing or more, or how your thing will respond to your efforts to manage it. And no matter how willingly you accept that about yourself, your compliance with fate doesn't earn you any say in anyone else's thing, either. Not even your own child's.

The nursery song I sang to my baby--"never let you go"--had been a lie. But it wasn't a cruel lie. It was a hopeful one. It was a lie to me as much as to him. It was a loving work of fiction to let myself enjoy those warm, snuggly evenings without thinking about the fact that one of those times would be the last time.

I had no experience with the panic that rises in a human heart when it's your job to take care of someone, but despite your efforts, they can't or won't respond to your care.

No one knows how anything is going to turn out, which means you can’t get all indignant because it turned out differently. There is no differently. There’s only the way it turns out. There’s only the ending that was always going to happen; you just didn’t know it.

How do we appropriately mourn the passage of time when it’s passing beautifully, safely, but not for everyone?

Then he admitted he had been having chest pain along with his back pain. I imagine he got out as much as, “chest p—” before my mother grabbed him by the arm and loaded him into the car. She can be cavalier about some things—slap a Band-Aid on it, take an Advil, walk it off—but worst-case scenarios are her time to shine. This is the woman who calls my children before they leave for summer camp to say, “Have fun! Watch for bears! Don’t get a flesh-eating amoeba!” I get my keen eye for alarming possibilities from her.

Dad had always composed his daily look carefully: neatly combed hair, seasonal tie featuring pumpkins in October or flags in July, dark leather loafers buffed to a high shine, white doctor’s coat laundered in hot water and pressed crisp. True, he also mowed the lawn in black knee socks and khaki shorts. I’m not saying he always made good choices, just that the outfits, like other decisions, had always been his to make.

walked through the airport to the security line, dragging my bag like a big blue dog on a leash. The travelers ahead of me in line stripped off their shoes, belts, hats, jackets, and watches. Everyone peeled off their armor to expose their soft inner layers, to prove they were harmless and safe to fly.

I took shallow breaths, as if the key to holding back tears was not to give them too much oxygen.

I wondered how much that difference in beginnings affected the kinds of mothers we turned into, or if it did at all.

When we begin things, we can’t possibly know how they will end. Everything we plan is built on guesses and hopes,

the whole point of adolescence is to prepare for departure. That’s why teenagers are so rebellious and messy and rude. The birds soil the nest, and then you’re ready for the birds to go.

What if you want them to go, because you want them to have full lives, but you also, simultaneously and secretly and impossibly, want them to stay by your side forever?

If only we knew which people we should be paying attention to, how wide the circle should be. And if only we were all allotted just one awful thing. Then, when it happened, we would know we didn’t have to wait for any more. The problem with worry is that the scope is infinite.

I can't get my verb tenses right. This person, my son, is going to leave my home and sleep somewhere else and have a whole life away from me. I know that, but right now I am looking at him and thinking, He is my child, and you're telling me that's about to be over? I don't understand how parenting will become past if I always love my children in the present.

The point is: “Home” is the state of warmth and safety and love among the inhabitants of my heart, so leave home does not make sense.

If only we knew which people we should be paying attention to,

not delusional enough to hope teen leave would take off. But wouldn’t it be nice if it did? (We could call it mateenity leave. No? Okay.)

What if it feels like the world is stealing them from you,

The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind, too—and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t hold on to anything, even your own face, which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time. But maybe that’s the job of our faces, to help us get used to letting go. Mine is giving me plenty of practice.

It’s strange how a before-and-after moment can be so unceremonious.

The phrase “turtles all the way down” refers to the “world turtle theory”—derived from various Hindu, Chinese, and Native American myths—that the earth is actually flat and sits balanced on a turtle, who is balanced on another turtle, who is balanced on another, et cetera. It’s a way of saying there ultimately isn’t any real truth, because everything we take as fact is explained by another fact, which is validated by another fact, all the way down to some kind of fact we had to have made up in the first place. Our whole lives, by that logic, rest upon explanations we’ve rigged up to justify explanations for whatever we were looking to understand. Turtles upon turtles upon turtles.

I looked directly at the sadness in books as a child because I was curious. Looking made me feel profound sorrow, and while I didn’t enjoy sorrow itself, I was amazed to know the depth of it. The more I saw and heard of the real world, the more I came to suspect that there was sadness everywhere, and if I was going to live in this world, I should understand its scale and reach.

How do you tell yourself that something isn’t to be worried about when you have evidence that it is? How do you say, “Yes, that happened, but it won’t happen again,” when you know it could?

A heart can only hold so many hypotheticals.

When you can no longer count on stability, the key is to grab something solid and hold on for dear life.

Sometimes what the universe is telling me is not, You can’t have what you want, but, What you want does not exist for you.

I don’t have to find a way to live with something I’m not required to live with.

The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind, too—and there’s nothing you can do about it.

couldn’t stop laughing. “Are you kidding me? You can juggle?” It was like I had accidentally fallen against a hollow wall that gave way to a secret room.

He had never imagined war as some kind of vague, far-off possibility. He knew the truth, that whether it is happening here at home or on a continent far enough away to seem “foreign” to those who wish to distance themselves from it, conflict is raging somewhere at any given time. War is always.

People think that if someone reveals a part of herself, they are entitled to all the other parts, too. At a certain level of creative success, the artist becomes a product people buy.

There’s an almost inevitable failure built into caring for two people during a moment when one is in crisis and one is not. Because while you may love those people equally, with a fierceness unique to each, you must throw your arms out to catch the one who is falling, and that means you’re not there to catch the other, should they fall, too.

Because young children are constantly experiencing things for the first time, everything that happens is at least a little bit of a shock. As far as I could tell, knowing what to freak out about boiled down to two things: repetition and proximity. If a bad thing happened a lot, or if it happened nearby, it required attention.

I try to explain that I am obsessed with death because I am in love with life. I grieve in advance of loss—losses that will definitely happen, along with some that may not—because I recognize that what I have is so good. I don’t mean to muck up the beauty of now with my tears about later, but I can’t help it. I’m sad because I’m so happy. See?

We take care of who we can and what we can, near and far, because that’s the job. That is life.

It’s true: There will always be threats lurking under the water where we play, danger hiding in the attic and rolling down the street on heavy wheels, unexpected explosions in our brains and our hearts and the sky. There will always be bombs, and we will never be able to save everyone we care about. To know that and to try anyway is to be fully alive. The closest thing to shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give it.

Taking things seriously without taking yourself too seriously keeps people on their toes, not to mention makes life more interesting.

But lately what I’ve been thinking, deep in the part of my brain with the other thoughts I don’t want to put words to, is: Someone needs to hurry up and learn how to do the things my mom has been doing all my life.

Half of me wants to figure out how to tighten up the crumbly edges and get my jawline back, and half of me wants to give up the burden of giving a damn what anyone thinks of my face.

I know this happens with memoir: People think they know the whole person behind the book just because they know the parts of the person that are in the book.

There’s so much of my life that isn’t in my books—even within a particular story, so many parts that don’t make it onto the page. I might write about something I did and give two reasons I did it, but leave out the third reason because it would distract from the point I’m making and/or it overlaps with someone else’s life and I’m respecting their privacy. So a reader might evaluate that scene and decide, “That was the right thing to do” or “Oh, I hate that she did that.” It’s a fair judgment of the me-character in the story as written, but it is not—it can’t be—an informed judgment of me, the actual person.

When I looked at my face up close, I was neither admiring nor judging myself. I was observing myself, in a sort of quiet, visual conversation. It was strangely intimate

Sometimes I felt like everyone else was a real-live, walking and talking human and I was just part of the background, an omniscient narrator of the illusion I saw as the world. Everyone else was an active object, but I was the wall. I was the atmosphere. I forgot that I had this face—these eyes, this nose, this mouth. I was no more and no less a body than everyone else.

Ocean Vuong wrote in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that the human eye is “god’s loneliest creation.

I do occasionally look at my kitchen table and imagine what the surface of it looks like,

I don’t write books to make strangers understand me. When I write a book, I’m taking a small group of scenes from my whole life, assembling them in a certain order to create a particular emotional arc or “plot,” all for the purpose of telling a story about what it means to be human.

Nora Ephron and Laurie Colwin. Choose one of their essay collections, like Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck or Colwin’s Home Cooking,

had other purposes before they were born, and I have other purposes still. But that one purpose rose out of the water like a volcanic mountain and eclipsed the rest. It is hard for a human being not to have a purpose or, at least, not to have the one that for so long dominated all the others.

I grieve in advance of loss—losses that will definitely happen, along with some that may not—because I recognize that what I have is so good. I don’t mean to muck up the beauty of now with my tears about later, but I can’t help it. I’m sad because I’m so happy. See?

It is never pointless to love someone.

I knew I had the perspective right as long as I could define what I was writing by saying, “This is a story about a woman who…” and not “This is a story about a boy who…(or a girl who…or a man who…or a family who…)” If I kept that perspective right, then the boundaries would be obvious.

If I can scrape up some evidence of a thing made beautifully or a gesture made kindly, then I can believe, for a few seconds, that this world is careful and kind. And if I can believe that, I can believe it is safe to let the people I love walk around out there.