Everything I Never Told You Quotes

“For as long as she’s been alive, the family has never spoken of it, and even if they had, it would have changed nothing.”

“Sweetheart, I know high school might not feel important, but it’s the foundation for the rest of your life.”

″‘Don’t you talk to me that way,’ he says. ‘Don’t you question me. You don’t know anything about my life’.”

″‘Your mother’s home,’ he said, as if they couldn’t see her standing there in the doorway behind him.”

“After a few stuttering replies, the spotlight would swivel back to Lydia, and Nath would retreat to his room and his aeronautics magazines.”

“Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.”

“This little man, five-foot-nine at most and not even American, was going to teach them about cowboys?”

“You’re the kind of girl I should have married. ”

“Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say. ”

″ That most important word: tomorrow. ”

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

″ Lydia’s quietness, her lack of friends. Her recent sinking grades. And, in truth, the strangeness of her family. A family with no friends, a family of misfits.”

“That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved. She had felt Nath’s hands on her shoulders and been almost grateful to fall forward, to let herself sink… Don’t let me sink, she had thought as she reached for his hand, and he had promised not to when he took it. This moment, Lydia thought. This is where it all went wrong.”

″ ‘I am disappointed.” Marilyn’s head snaps up. ‘l thought you were different.’ What she means is: I thought you were better than other men. I thought you wanted better than that. ”

″ The confident young man in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy. ”

“When Nath had been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a photograph. What was there to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it.”

“It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right. ”

“What else have you been hiding?’’

“Of course it was possible for her: she had no husband. ”

“You don’t want that ... You think you do.”