Deb Caletti Quotations

Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because were liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.

'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby.

I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!

Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.

My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. Its kind of self-therapy.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.

I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.

I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.

Ive never met a popcorn ball I didnt like.

When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.

It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.

Fear was the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told the truth.

They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

I know parental embarrassment usually stops somewhere at fifteen, but he just kept on giving me good reasons.

I grow green beans in my garden. The one thing I know about harvesting them is that you need to train your eyes to see the beans. At first it all looks like leaves, until you see one bean and then another and another. If you want clarity, too, you have to look hard. You have to look under things and look from different angles. You'll see what you need to when you do that. A hundred beans, suddenly.

Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.

The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.

But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first… I had to look

...we are all a volume on the shelf of the... library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands.

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

So I forcibly shove aside my prickles of pissed-off, which is easier than it sounds when millions of little sequined caffeine dancers are doing their big Broadway number on your internal stage. (Page 173)

Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.

...wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

No, Mom. I said fine." "It's just your tone." Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.

I've come to the conclusion that it's all about fear- fear that your kid won't come out on top, be a success. Forcing him into these brutal encounters will a) make a dame sure he is a success, and b) all you to see evidence of that success with the added bonus of a cheering crowd. This means that sports are supported with an almost desperate enthusiasm. The football team gets catered dinners before a fame. Honor Society is lucky if it gets a cupcake. Academic success-forget it. That requires too much imagination. There's no scoreboard.

We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.

Are you getting your period?" She narrows her eyes. No! God. I hate that. I hate when every negative act is blamed on your period." Sometimes bitchiness is just bitchiness, happily unattached to anything hormonal. It should get full credit.

In the two months I had also dated Justin Fellowes, this guy in my Spanish class, though after three weeks we decided we should "see other people," which in my case was a joke, but it beat hearing him remark on everything I ate. 'I don't know why girls are always on a diet,' he'd say when I ordered a Diet Coke, and 'You should watch your starch intake' when I had a muffin.

I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.

What’s that about? Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.

You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.

Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.

A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn’t.

This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

It's shocking the things we call love.

So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.

Have you worked here long?" Sebastian asks. Just a few months," I say. "Do you come here a lot?" As if you don't know, Jade. I used to come every day, or, you know, when I could, I'd bring Bo after work. Or just myself." At night sometimes. You'd climb the fence. You'd watch the stars. You'd tilt back your head and look at the sky. You'd think it over, whatever it was.

Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.

It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.

I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.

It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.

summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. for those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. you can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. summer just opens the door and lets you out.

Once, I had to drive Oliver to soccer, was ten minutes late, and learned that there had apparently been a misprint in the Bible on the Ten Commandments thing: Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not be late to soccer. My father was so pissed, I practically had to get the lightning bolt surgically removed from my back.

Maybe a person's world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.

And pity--people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you--that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.

People are secretive when they have secrets.

We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.

It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama.

The six rules of maybe 1. respect the power of hope and possibilites. Begin with beleif. Hold onto it. 2. If you known where you want to go, you're already half way there. Know what you desire but, more imporantly, why you desire it. Then go. 3. hopes and dreams and heart's desires require a clear path-get out of your own way 4. Place hope carefully in your own hands and in the hands of others 5. Persist, if necessary 6. That said, most importantly-know when you've reached an end, Quit, give up, do it with courage. Giving up is not failing-it's the chance to begin again.

Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light--a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.

The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love--it's less shiny than solid and simple.

Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.

Love with someone else, an actual person, was another matter. People got hurt doing that. People cried and wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked with loss. Loving words got turned to fierce, sharp, whip-cracks of anger that lefft permanent marks. At the least, it disappointed you. At most, it damaged you.

Just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don't wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs or worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.

To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.

We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers.

Being needed was a handy trick. It could fill you up so full you never even noticed all the places that were empty.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we didn't do

If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny) Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they choose. If they want to remind you forevermore that they exist, they will. They can reappear in a card or call or a "chance" meeting, they can remember your birthday or the day you met with some innocuous small note. No matter how little they matter in your new life, they can insist on being seen and recognized and remembered.

Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.

If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.

A lady I will be, but a man's accessory, his handbag, no thank you. I will not be someone's ornament. I will not just be someone's honey, baby, sweetheart.

...What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it...it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.

Maybe we ought to look at a guy's response to our microwave from now on." Aunt Annie said. Really." Mom said. "The narcissist looks at his reflection in it. The OCD guy thinks you don't keep it clean enough.The antisocial--" Puts his fist through it because it reminds him of his father." Annie said. She'd read all of mom's books, too. And the paranoid one would be jealous of the amount of time you spend cooking." Mom said Were you using that microwave again? Is something going on between the two of you? I caught you looking right at its clock." Annie said.

Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless

I may be nervous," I say. "Okay, I'm really glad you said that, because I just went to the back room to put on more deodorant." Sebastian says.

I love to see those paragliders weaving softly around Moon Point, their legs floating above you in the air. When they drift in for a landing, their feet touch the ground and they trot forward from the continued motion of the glider, which billows down like a setting sun. I never get tired of watching them and I've seen them thousands of times. I always wondered what that kind of freedom would feel like.

The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever... It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some authority. Like it's been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance.

This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we've finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it's shut for good.

Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity.

You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did.