The Arrangement Sarah Dunn Quotes

Life is long. And it’s getting longer for most of us. Most people in this country will have three or four marriages in their lifetime. Each one will challenge them and suit them in a different way. The lucky few, the ones who are willing to work at it, will have a handful of very different marriages, all with the same person. —

The only time to move to New York City is when you're fresh out of college, unless you happen to be rich. If you're rich, you can move to New York whenever you want.

If you're content not having sex with your partner, that's fine. But you might want to consider the following fact. Most people are having sex with somebody. - Constance Waverly, The Waverly Report

(on fading passion) Sex was like the can of baking powder she kept on a high shelf in her pantry, something she didn’t need right now but that she knew she could get her hands on without too much trouble.

...it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children's needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn't get. It's very hard.

Life is long. And it’s getting longer for most of us. Most people in this country will have three or four marriages in their lifetime. Each one will challenge them and suit them in a different way. The lucky few, the ones who are willing to work at it, will have a handful of very different marriages, all with the same person. —Constance Waverly TED Talk

All paradises fail. —Constance Waverly

A woman wearing saggy old workout clothes that she never worked out in, that had somehow become her pajamas and the clothes she went to the grocery store in and the clothes she wore around the house all day, with her dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail and who looked like she’d just been run over by a sedan.

We're not buying Sam's Club condoms,” said Owen. “Their trash bags don't even work.

I'm too busy being the bad guy.” It was one of those things that get said in a marriage, something that starts out as a genuine compliment but turns into a criticism without either party noticing or caring all that much.

What you guys have is enough. It’s a fuckload more than most people ever get, ever even dream of getting, and it is your job, it’s your duty while you are alive on this planet, to be thankful for it. And to protect it too.

it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children’s needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn’t get. It’s very hard.

The only time to move to New York City is when you’re fresh out of college, unless you happen to be rich. If you’re rich, you can move to New York whenever you want.

But Lucy was unmothered, as unmothered as it was possible to be, and the thing that therapist never told her, the six-months you’re-so-very-resilient therapist, was that it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children’s needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn’t get. It’s very hard.

Shoes that tied were the first thing to go. Lucy needed shoes she could put on without using her hands, with a writhing, screaming, occasionally biting child in her arms, shoes she could tip up with her toes and slide her feet into without so much as bending a knee. Flip-flops when at all possible, clogs or Merrells the rest of the time. Then it was earrings. Earrings were so long gone, the holes in her ears had closed up. Next it was eyeliner, then mascara, then returning phone calls, then going to the dentist, then looking in a full-length mirror before she left the house, then lip gloss, unless she found some in the bottom of her purse while she was stopped at a red light. There was more, of course. Pedicures, thank-you notes, RSVPs, Christmas cards, flossing, stretching, remembering birthdays, exfoliation. Basically, Lucy was down to nothing but deodorant, toothpaste, and a ponytail five days out of seven. She

It was one of those truths about raising a child that was almost impossible to imagine. The fact that these things would disappear, the body-to-body connection that began that first day in the hospital would one day come to an end.