Allison Winn Scotch Quotes

“Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“You have to know ... What you have to know in all of this, through all of this, is that no matter how lost you are in this maze of hell and confusion, that in the end, I promise you, you will be found.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“What was the one moment we lost our way? Or was it a series of moments that snowballed into something larger, something intangible, something careeining forward with too much acceleration for us to stop it now?”

— Allison Winn Scotch

I might have felt broken, but at the end of it all, I didn't allow myself to break.

— Allison Winn Scotch

That's the thing," Jo says. "You think you know what you're in for. I mean, you tell yourself that, of course, it's not going to be wine and roses and all of that bullshit for the rest of your life, but then, one day, you wake up, and your fucking husband has morphed into someone whom you barely recognize. And you sit there and you stare at him while he scratches his balls through his underwear at the kitchen table, and you think, 'This is totally not what I signed up for. I mean, who knows if I even love this ball-scratching, foul-breathed man?' And then you wonder if you love him more out of habit than out of anything else." She chews the inside of her lip and considers. "And I guess from there, all bets are off.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“I'd recognized it only recently. I wasn't sure if it was because she had changed or I had, but it didn't really matter. I recognized it just the same ... If you just noticed the shiny veneer on the outside, they'd always look perfect. So you had to peer closer, watch them when they didn't think they were being watched. Eventually, you'd notice the dings.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

Jake: I'm not offering up excuses of any kind ... I was just saying that sometimes shit happens, and I don't have a choice.
Natalie: No, Jake, that's where you're wrong. Me getting cancer? True enough, I had no choice. How you treat the ones you love? Well, there, you always have a choice.

— Allison Winn Scotch

I press my eyes shut and will the thoughts away. But they refuse to comply, and instead, they lodge themselves in the crevasses of my brain, poking out just enough that I know they're still with me, like a tiny splinter in your baby toe that gnaws away at you with every step you take.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“And that, despite the fact that we'd broken up seven years prior and I'd been the one to finally-firmly and permanently-walk away from him and on toward Henry, his engagement and upcoming wedding still ate away at my emotional landscape, as if him avowing himself to another woman was somehow a blight, a pox on me.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I'd soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect though in far different ways.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“That you can look back fondly or even wistfully on pieces of your life and hound yourself with endless what-ifs, but nothing will change. The present will still be the present. The future will still unfold as it's meant to.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“Nothing is different here and now than it used to be: The people whom I need most are gone, and the ones who remain do nothing to help me get to where I need to go. Different names, different faces, but the end result is still the same.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“I smiled sweetly and pushed up on my tiptoes, kissing him softly on his too-chapped lips, and agreed. Yes, to us.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“My spine shoots up straight like I'd been plugged into an eight-volt, and the mere sight of him literally causes my breath to leave my body.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“But I suppose our childhoods are seeds inside of us that plant roots forever, even when we're certain their life cycles have long since been extinguished. How long will it take for my own roots to loosen their grip?”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“Now-after years of knowing what real problems were, after living with a man who was cautiously loving but no longer fawningly committed, a man who was rational and smart but not quite passionate or spontaneous, after slowly spinning away from the person I vowed to be true to for the rest of my years, after feeling like I lost myself in his shadows and goals-the arguments over restaurants, over who took the trash out last seemed futile, silly, and so much easier than the hurdles that Henry and I would come to face in the road of the future.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I'd built around myself-because, to my father's credit, he'd never asked me to captain our plagued family's ship-it all collapsed.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in
one after the next.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“Eventually kids become grown-ups too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“I'm better at life with you in it.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

There's always more than one path, and to think otherwise is what resigns you to fate.

— Allison Winn Scotch

“We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“No one really can have any idea if it's luck or happenstance or timing or fate or the universe or just smart choices that grant you a good life, a happy one. All we can do is decide to own our choices no matter what, to honor them and ourselves as best we can. That whatever is within our control (and there is plenty that is not) is ours. Mine. Responsibility. Conviction.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“I like to take inspiration from people who do things that I could never do.”

— Allison Winn Scotch

“If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?”

— Allison Winn Scotch