Sandwich Quotes

“And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Don’t placate me,” I say quietly. “It’s not okay. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m right to be mad!” Am I, though? I fucking am! “It’s so annoying the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time. And then be soft and open and fuckable. It’s infuriating!”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“We're just ruined by sex, women---our bodies, our psyches. We're sexually assaulted every five minutes. We're infected with everything. Traumatized by conceiving, by not conceiving. But let's keep at it? Like, you've been in a maiming car accident and then you're supposed to want to get back in the car? I mean, what?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Here’s the thing about menopause, though, that I don’t entirely understand. We’ll exchange a few words like this? A seemingly slight disagreement? Only then rage fizzes up inside my rib cage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter—dark matter that’s kind of like a magic serpent and kind of like a giant ash turd. “Why do I have to be in charge of every single thing?” I hiss.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“often an empty nest is two birds looking at each other, shell-shocked and nostalgic, over the single worm they’re now splitting for dinner, discussing what to do with the worm leftovers.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“There are wounds that never really heal, no matter how much time they take.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Willa once shared her theory that finding a four-leaf clover was a symptom of luck, not a cause. “It just means you have the kind of life where there are growing things and you have time to look at them,” she said. I think she was actually making a point about class privilege? But I like to imagine that luck is everywhere, even before you find it.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“In the passenger seat of one slightly rusting silver Subaru station wagon: a woman in her fifties. She is halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents. She is long married to a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of a life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“So much of privileged adulthood seems to take place here, in the space between the soaring highs and the killing disasters. It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“There are so many ways to lose our children, and I have imagined most of them”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Despite the many cheerful photographs suggesting otherwise, I did not love lunch on the beach when the kids were little. They were so committed, it seemed, to getting sand in the cooler, sand in the chip bag, sand in the cherry bag, the cookies, the pretzels. They dropped their sandwiches into the sand, spilled my iced tea into the sand, poured sand over their own sweaty heads for no reason and cried. They stuffed their sandy baby fingers into my nostrils. They groped me with their sandy palms. They tracked sand over the towels and through my psyche. All I wanted was two unsandy seconds to swallow down their peanut butter and jelly crusts and call it a meal.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“People who insist that you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“It’s true that I didn’t want to sit on the floor in the afternoon and play with trains or pour imaginary tea. But I was a good parent in the night.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Hmmm,” I say now. I’m punching the word C-U-N-T-Y into the Spelling Bee, just to entertain myself. Not in word list, the Bee responds, deadpan. I see T-E-A-T but refuse to enter it. What am I—a sow nursing her piglets? “I’m lazy. Let’s drink our coffee and then make more coffee and then maybe go to the beach?”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“How are these adults my children? is what I really want to say. And why are they so beautiful? Willa,”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“This is how it is to love somebody. You tell them the truth. You lie a little. And sometimes you don’t say anything at all.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“But share everything that matters. And keep loving each other massively.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Sunglasses and sunscreen and sandy feet pressed against her thighs and stomach. Little children running across the sand with their little pails. Her own parents laughing in their beach chairs, shrinking inside their clothes as the years pass. Grief bright in the periphery, like a light flashing just out of view.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“The children’s features shattered me a little bit—as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich