Top 50 Mary Kubica Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “She says that the sky was the color of persimmon and sangria, shades of red only God could make.”

— Mary Kubica

2. “As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.”

— Mary Kubica

3. “The Chicago winter is harsh. But every now and then God blesses us with a thirty-or forty-degree day to remind us that misery comes and goes.”

— Mary Kubica

4. “Teenagers believe they’re invincible – nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen.”

— Mary Kubica

5. “Sometimes being scared makes you do things you didn’t know you could do.”

— Mary Kubica

6. “I don’t tell her the way she makes me feel when she looks at me, or how I hear her voice at night, in my dreams, forgiving me. I don’t tell her I’m sorry, though I am. I don’t tell her that I think she’s beautiful, even when I see her look in a mirror and hate the image she sees.”

— Mary Kubica

7. “What is perfect is the way she looks at me, and the way she says my name. The way her hand strokes my hair, though I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. The way we lay together night after night. The way I feel: complete. What is perfect is the way she sometimes smiles and she sometimes laughs. The way we can say anything that comes to mind, or sit together for hours in absolute silence.”

— Mary Kubica

8. “I’m trapped inside a funhouse whereby everything is skewed, and my center of gravity is thrown off by centrifugal force.”

— Mary Kubica

9. “I never noticed the whir of the ceiling fan, but the absence of it I do. The absence of it is deafening.”

— Mary Kubica

10. “I run my hand the length of her hair. My hands move down her arms. They memorize her fingers and the shape of her back. She stares at me with this look I’ve never seen before, not on her or any other woman. Trust. Respect. Desire. I commit to memory every freckle, every blemish on her face. I learn the shape of her ears and run a finger across the arch of her lips.”

— Mary Kubica

11. “Being unbiased is important. Every woman is not me.”

— Mary Kubica

12. “That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you.”

— Mary Kubica

13. “According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health. Unless of course you have a dog who pees uncontrollably wherever it wishes or eats your furniture to shreds.”

— Mary Kubica

14. “They say time heals all wounds.”

— Mary Kubica

15. “Picasso, that’s abstract art. Kandinsky. Jackson Pollock.”

— Mary Kubica

16. “My mind considers for one split second a world without Esther, and it makes me feel sad.”

— Mary Kubica

17. “I wanted to see if you were okay,” he says, and I curtly answer, “I’m fine,” while wiping the tears from my eyes.”

— Mary Kubica

18. “I watch the way her skin becomes red from the cold. The way her hair blows around in the breeze. She tucks it behind an ear, hoping to contain it, but it doesn’t work. Not all things like to be contained.”

— Mary Kubica

19. “She is beautiful. Magnetic, really, the kind of individual who draws people with her idiosyncratic hair and heterochromatic eyes.”

— Mary Kubica

20. “A man who is willing to cheat on his wife, she said, will often make promises to you that he can’t keep. When he tells you he loves you, it’s a form of entrapment. Cheating spouses are masters at manipulation, she said. He may tell you things to keep you from ending the affair. He has both a wife and a lover on the side. He has no incentive to change.”

— Mary Kubica

21. “A common belief during labor is that a baby’s needs supersede that of the mother’s. Women don’t always know they have options. Or they aren’t given a choice in their care. If they are, they aren’t allowed ample time or information to come to a decision themselves. Choices are made without their consent. Too many women don’t want to be a burden and so they say nothing. The mistreatment is subtle, too, and falls under the guise of medical care.”

— Mary Kubica

22. “We fall into oblivion this way, into a world where nothing matters. Nothing but us.”

— Mary Kubica

23. “The ducks and geese fly overhead. Everyone is leaving me.”

— Mary Kubica

24. “I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.”

— Mary Kubica

25. “If time can turn something so undesired into something so loved, the same can happen to all of us. The same can happen to me.”

— Mary Kubica

26. “Little does she know it, but she occupies ever spare moment of my time.”

— Mary Kubica

27. “That I love her. That I’m sorry.”

— Mary Kubica

28. “What did you want?” she asks. What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.”

— Mary Kubica

29. “My imagination is my worst enemy in this moment.”

— Mary Kubica

30. “The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage.”

— Mary Kubica

31. “I’ve been following her for the last few days. I know where she buys her groceries where she has her dry cleaning done, where she works. I’ve never spoken to her. I wouldn’t recognize the sound of her voice. I don’t know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she’s scared. But I will.”

— Mary Kubica

32. “But if I wanted to atone, I would have bought her that sketch pad.”

— Mary Kubica

33. “I was enraptured by this handsome man I’d met in a restaurant in the city, this alluring man who made me feel like I walked on air. Now he’s gone and all that remains in the space between us are hurt feelings and despicable words.”

— Mary Kubica

34. “She says that she used to enjoy, when darkness set in, when the outside world changed. She describes it for me: the way the streetlights and buildings twinkled in the night sky. She says that she liked the anonymity of it, and all the possibilities that developed when the sun went to sleep. But now the darkness terrifies her, all the nameless things on the other side of the silk drapes.”

— Mary Kubica

35. “Rather, she lives in the place of light sleep, where the variance between sleep and awake is often blurred.”

— Mary Kubica

36. “I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.”

— Mary Kubica

37. “The weathermen warn us for days of the impending snowstorm that’s to arrive Thursday night. The grocery stores have run out of bottle water as people prepare to take shelter in their homes; my God, I think, it’s winter, an annual certainty, not the atomic bomb.”

— Mary Kubica

38. “There’s so much hope in his eyes, hope and desperation, a toxic combination, it seems – so much to gain, so much to lose.”

— Mary Kubica

39. “The way the psychiatrist explained it to me,” Dad says, “being isolated in the dark for as long as your sister was drives people to the brink of insanity. It impairs their sense of time, their sleep cycles. Without being able to see, they suffer sensory deprivation.”

— Mary Kubica

40. “He is the best!!! says one review, with an overkill of exclamation points that makes me question the reviewer’s mental health and state of mind.”

— Mary Kubica

41. “I came to understand it wasn’t about the information itself but the exchange: a pact, a bond.”

— Mary Kubica

42. “But there was something telling about that photograph, I thought; our protective glass frame shattered and now here we were, punctured with microscopic holes that might one day tear. Those holes all had names: mortgage, adolescent child, lack of communication, retirement savings, cancer.”

— Mary Kubica

43. “It must be thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees, when we head out for our walk, the kind of day that teenagers foolishly rush out in shorts and t-shirts, forgetting that in October we were aghast at temperatures like this.”

— Mary Kubica

44. “There’s nothing worse than lying in bed, restless, worrying about things I can’t do anything about.”

— Mary Kubica

45. “His arms wrap around me from behind, and my heart rhythm slows to a steady jog. His chin rests on the top of my head, and my breath comes back to me, oxygen filling my lungs.”

— Mary Kubica

46. “She said something to you and you smiled and I thought to myself that I’d never seen anything so... I don’t know... I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life.”

— Mary Kubica

47. “As it was, it was the baby or me, and I chose me, a decision that would haunt me for the rest of my life.”

— Mary Kubica

48. “Now he was all grown up, working in the Financial.”

— Mary Kubica

49. “I’ve always hoped that wherever you were and whatever you were doing, you were happy.”

— Mary Kubica

50. “But mostly I think of the things I didn’t do.”

— Mary Kubica