The Echo Wife Quotes

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“He was relieved to have told me. He transmuted his guilt into my anger and now I was the one who had to carry it and he had the audacity to be relieved.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Why would you ever cut the blooms off the rosebush?
It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Twice in my life now, I have buried myself in finery. Twice, I have arranged myself within a great compilation of fabric to prove that I understand the importance of a moment. It's clothing as contrition - a performance of beauty I have to put on to pay penance to the people gathered to acknowledge me. They are here to see me. And I must apologize for requesting their attention. Must make up for the weight of my demand by ensuring that looking at me will be a pleasant thing. Never mind the suffocation of the outfit, never mind the expense, never mind the impracticality. The transaction must be made. My efforts at beauty in exchange for their regard. And so, twice in my life, I have worn the cost of that recognition.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the tempting thing was an ongoing one,”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“If you are loved, then you cannot be replaced.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“If I had been replaced with a reasonable facsimile of the person I’d been, would anyone notice?”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Things get ruined sometimes. That’s just how it is.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again—to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“I had gotten through the previous year of impossibly hellish obstacles. I had survived the discovery and the betrayal and the fallout. I could handle this banquet.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Getting caught in a lie is so much worse than saying nothing.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“..."Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you," he said. "Never let anyone make you say that you're sorry just to appease them."...”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“It didn't occur to me to watch for cowardice the same way I watched for anger.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“allowing myself to collapse into a parenthesis.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you," he said. "Never let anyone make you say that you're sorry just to appease them.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once, if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens by inches, in a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“It was a place that could have been charming, if only it had been entirely different.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“I became an alone-thing, more than I had ever been before.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Some might consider this isolating, but I’m not in the business of seeking out chaos simply to appease some arbitrary notion of social nourishment.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“I missed that handshake. I missed the grown-up feeling of having successfully completed a maneuver that existed solely to prove that both parties knew what they were doing.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“By accepting the isolation that came along with my secret, I could rest assured that no matter what, I would always be at least a little hidden. No one would ever know me, not fully, because no one would ever know what had happened. There was a piece of me now that no one would ever be able to reach.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“There were other holes scattered through the yard, shallow ones, and I realized that she must have been searching for the boundaries of her discovery—trying to see if her entire garden was planted on a necropolis.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“When he sent me to bed, he grabbed my jaw again, gentler this time, though I still flinched. There was no anger in his touch this time. He looked into my eyes to make sure I was paying attention. "Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you," he said. "Never let anyone make you say that you're sorry just to appease them." ...”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“He would commence giving a shit about my emotions the moment I raised them as a subject of concern, and not a second sooner. Inside my lab, I could afford to frown.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Why would you ever cut the blooms off the rosebush? It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it. She put the shears in my hand and pointed to a few places on a lilac plant. She showed me which flowers were fading. She told me that if I didn’t remove the still-pretty flowers now, there wouldn’t be any next year.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“the same colorless hair, the same dishwater-gray eyes, the same thin mouth as that woman. I wouldn’t act like her too.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife