Regina Calcaterra · 320 pages
Rating: (12.1K votes)
“I’m thirteen—and a half.” He looks at me suspiciously. “Weren’t you eleven last”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“On the days that feel dark and endless, I make myself a simple promise: I’ll get out of bed in the morning. Then I’ll head up the hill to class. If I put one foot in front of the other, day by day, I’ll move closer to the light at the end of all this struggle.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“People look but don’t see, why? People hear but don’t listen, why? People touch, but don’t feel, why?”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“No accomplishment has taken place without trial, and no growth could have occurred without unwavering love. This is the story of how it took a community to raise a child . . . and how that child used her future to give hope back.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“There’s no way a person could be born into dysfunction, fighting to survive and helping her family do the same, without some purpose to give it all meaning.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“She steps back—she’s contemplating whether I will accept her explanation. But I know it will never be possible for her to acknowledge what she did, the same as it will never be possible for me to fully forget it:”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“After I put on my coat, I turn and whisper to Camille: “Just a minute.” In the living room, I leave a wide space between myself and the recliner where Cookie’s sitting, knowing that distance from her is the only thing that has kept me both physically and emotionally safe. Wearing a blue flannel shirt, black stretch pants, and a scowl, she slowly meets my eyes. The TV’s reflection flashes off the lenses of her huge, shaded eyeglasses. “Good-bye,” I tell her. It comes out cold and flat. When she responds with silence, I nod. This is all I’ll get. Cherie opens the front door, and Camille and I exit with her. When the three of us get to the train station, we all break down in tears. It’s a cry of anger for our mother’s failure to take responsibility, for the unfairness of having had no say in choosing who brought us into this world . . . and for our relief knowing that soon she’ll be gone, for good.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
“I remember a verse I once spotted that Julia had highlighted in her Bible: The truth will set you free. I’ve never been able to forget those words. Even when it hurts, it’s more empowering to know the truth than to stay blind to it.”
― Regina Calcaterra, quote from Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
Regina Calcaterra
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“We that are bred up in learning, and destinated by our parents to this end, we suffer our childhood in the grammar-school, which Austin calls magnam tyrannidem, et grave malum, and compares it to the torments of martyrdom; when we come to the university, if we live of the college allowance, as Phalaris objected to the Leontines, [Greek: pan ton endeis plaen limou kai phobou] , needy of all things but hunger and fear, or if we be maintained but partly by our parents' cost, do expend in unnecessary maintenance, books and degrees, before we come to any perfection, five hundred pounds, or a thousand marks. If by this price of the expense of time, our bodies and spirits, our substance and patrimonies, we cannot purchase those small rewards, which are ours by law, and the right of inheritance, a poor parsonage, or a vicarage of 50 l. per annum, but we must pay to the patron for the lease of a life (a spent and out-worn life) either in annual pension, or above the rate of a copyhold, and that with the hazard and loss of our souls, by simony and perjury, and the forfeiture of all our spiritual preferments, in esse and posse, both present and to come. What father after a while will be so improvident to bring up his son to his great charge, to this necessary beggary? What Christian will be so irreligious, to bring up his son in that course of life, which by all probability and necessity, coget ad turpia, enforcing to sin, will entangle him in simony and perjury, when as the poet said, Invitatus ad hæc aliquis de ponte negabit: a beggar's brat taken from the bridge where he sits a begging, if he knew the inconvenience, had cause to refuse it." This being thus, have not we fished fair all this while, that are initiate divines, to find no better fruits of our labours, [2030] hoc est cur palles, cur quis non prandeat hoc est? do we macerate ourselves for this? Is it for this we rise so early all the year long? [2031] "Leaping" (as he saith) "out of our beds, when we hear the bell ring, as if we had heard a thunderclap." If this be all the respect, reward and honour we shall have, [2032] frange leves calamos, et scinde Thalia libellos: let us give over our books, and betake ourselves to some other course of life; to what end should we study?”
― Robert Burton, quote from The Anatomy of Melancholy
“When you are older you will meet a man who will love you for yourself. A good-natured, charming respectable man who is liked by you family.”
― Amanda Grange, quote from Mr. Darcy's Diary
“We know so little,” she said, “about even those who are closest to us. We know so little of what really goes on in other people’s lives.”
― Susan Howatch, quote from The Wheel of Fortune
“See this page of paper? It’s blank,” Scull said. “That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention,”
― Larry McMurtry, quote from Comanche Moon
“This morning, thanks to a controlled near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained pit bull named Chele, in Queens.
The pit bull, with no previous record of violence against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man with a history of heart trouble, grabbed him, allowing the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. Biagini in several places and then Mr. Biagini's heart quit beating, never to beat again. I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
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