Top 35 Claire Lombardo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You deserve to be with someone who can sit across the table from you and understand that it’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to him.”

— Claire Lombardo

2. “They would repeat it for years to come in times of strife: the most fun I’ve ever had.”

— Claire Lombardo

3. “You’re ethereal. My intangible everything.”

— Claire Lombardo

4. “It takes such a long time to realize that it’s worth it. I wonder why we’re engineered that way. We’re sleep-deprived to the point of madness those first couple of years and then one day you wake up and you see the little person you’ve created and she says a sentence to you and you realize that everything in your life has been an audition for the creation of that specific person. That you’re sending freestanding beings off into the world and it’s entirely on your shoulders.”

— Claire Lombardo

5. “Marilyn had gone to yoga while pregnant with Grace, had adjusted the household bedtime so she got enough sleep, had choked down the vitamins she’d evaded the first three times around. And what did any of it matter anymore, really, because Grace was smoking on the roof just like the other kids had done, having just undulated her way back home on the waves of a major lie.”

— Claire Lombardo

6. “I think we make each other happy. Not always the same amount, and not always at the same time...”

— Claire Lombardo

7. “Find yourself a man who likes to hold babies, she’d said to Liza once. It’s a sign of good character.”

— Claire Lombardo

8. “And he realized, then, how silly it seemed that you could ever know another person – really know her – and how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was like to be her, day after day.”

— Claire Lombardo

9. “She was just trying to do the right thing, but it wasn’t so easy, because everyone in her life had a different conception of what the right thing was, and she herself was caught somewhere in the middle...”

— Claire Lombardo

10. “And this was what worried her the most: nothing had ever felt as comfortable, as easy, as good as being with her parents, her family. No one, it seemed, would ever regard her with the same enthusiastic awe as her mother; the same quiet, feverish pride as her father. It aroused concern within that she was slated for a lifetime of disappointment from the outside.”

— Claire Lombardo

11. “Life was never going to be what she wanted it to be, and she’d decided to pragmatically lower her bar in a way that would have horrified her teenage self.”

— Claire Lombardo

12. “I think she’s needed a place that wasn’t home. Don’t we all need that sometimes?”

— Claire Lombardo

13. “I wish I could take it all away from you sweet thing. Her mom said simply. It was a strange sentence. Darkly poetic. One that with a subtle shift in vocal inflection could have been a curse instead of a sweet proclamation of motherly selflessness.”

— Claire Lombardo

14. “How could you grow people inside your own body, sprout them from your own extant materials, and suddenly be unable to recognize them?”

— Claire Lombardo

15. “It endeared him to her. How she loved him, missed him, wanted to kill him. If someone asked her to poetically describe her marriage, she would articulate that particular feeling, one of simultaneously wanting him pressed against her and also on another continent.”

— Claire Lombardo

16. “You were right,” she said. “Thanks,” he replied. “About what?” “About the fact that we’re never going to – you know. Reach the finish line. With the kids. There’s always going to be something.”

— Claire Lombardo

17. “It’s funny,” her mom continued. “I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”

— Claire Lombardo

18. “But that was the thing: sometimes being a sister meant knowing the right thing to do and still not doing it because winning was more important.”

— Claire Lombardo

19. “Maybe another person couldn’t irrevocably save you, but they could sometimes calm you down, and that felt like an exquisitely magical thing.”

— Claire Lombardo

20. “She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he has been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had.”

— Claire Lombardo

21. “There was a relief in just trying to experience him as a person, no management or censorship. She felt lighter than she had in ages. The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.”

— Claire Lombardo

22. “The kids were Marilyn’s life, parasite and sustenance, and he knew how much it thrilled her to think of them having kids of their own.”

— Claire Lombardo

23. “Nobody’s ever prepared to care for a child full-time, is what I mean. Nobody understands what that means until they do it for themselves. We’re all just holding our breath and hoping nothing catastrophic happens. And how deeply you get hurt doing that! It’s constant pain. It’s a parade of complete and utter agony, all the time, forever.”

— Claire Lombardo

24. “This was arguably one of the life-saving rationalizations for the institution of marriage, one party consumed with worry so the other could sleep through the night.”

— Claire Lombardo

25. “He’s sorry. He’s embarrassed. He’s hungry. The Catholic trifecta. You’ve taught him well.”

— Claire Lombardo

26. “Normalcy: it bore a second look, sociologically speaking.”

— Claire Lombardo

27. “The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.”

— Claire Lombardo

28. “And it was striking, how much less alone that could make you feel, because of course to be peopled at all was a high-order gift, but to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.”

— Claire Lombardo

29. “It’s a strange feeling to have as a kid, like you’re responsible for your parents’ happiness,” she’d said to him, surprising herself with how frankly she was able to describe the way it felt to be the daughter of her parents. He’d been an attentive audience. “Not that you’re the cause of it, but instead that there’s some obligation on your part to ensure it. I didn’t really realize until recently that that wasn’t normal.”

— Claire Lombardo

30. “She and David could talk about Wendy to only a certain degree of honesty; their firstborn was emblematic of too much for them both – too much heartbreak, too much tension, too much earth-shattering love.”

— Claire Lombardo

31. “She’d fallen into motherhood without intent, producing a series of daughters with varying shades of hair and varying degrees of unease.”

— Claire Lombardo

32. “The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.”

— Claire Lombardo

33. “I think we allow ourselves to hurt the people we love the most because we know they won’t abandon us.”

— Claire Lombardo

34. “Sometimes it was enough just to listen to voices that weren’t your own.”

— Claire Lombardo

35. “Life’s insistence on juxtaposing darkness and light would never cease to amaze him.”

— Claire Lombardo

36. “And while she never quite stopped resenting that fact, she held the anger back, stored it in the space behind her molars, biting down, every so often, and allowing herself to revel in the injustice.”

— Claire Lombardo