Best Quotes from The End Of Normal by Stephanie Madoff Mack with Page Numbers

I don’t know this person, this scared new self.

Now night terrors have become my normal.

How cruel that they would begin in a place that once felt so safe and comforting.

It doesn’t matter where I am anymore: The terror will find me.

Filled with dread, I follow what has become a horrifying ritual.

I need it to be time. I need it to be 4:14.

You might think we were more than content, living a dream life, even.

Our last day of normal fell in the winter of 2008.

I was seven months pregnant with our second child.

Mark worshipped Kate and her sixteen-year-old brother, Daniel, with a devotion I found alternately endearing and maddening.

I’ve always believed in soul mates. I grew up feeling absolutely certain that there was someone out there in the world meant only for me.

What was taking so long? Most of my friends who weren’t married were at least in relationships that were headed that way.

I figured I didn’t have much more time to waste if I wanted that happily-ever-after family I’d always imagined.

Maybe a divorced daddy pushing forty wasn’t out of the question after all.

He wanted someone with a sense of adventure, not some high-maintenance Park Avenue princess.

We immediately fell into the kind of comfortable conversation that feels like it’s resuming, not just beginning.

It felt like a honeymoon.

The feeling that I came third in Mark’s life—after his children, which was to be expected, and after his ex, which was not—would become so entrenched that it would drive us eventually to couple’s therapy.

I was going to stay. I’d be able to change his mind, I convinced myself.

I felt like an idiot. A very happy one.

From the moment I became a Madoff, I struggled to find mine.

There was a clarity to him, cool and clean as water.

Authenticity was more important to him than adulation.

If it’s something you really want to do, Steph, you should do it.

I didn’t just want to experience motherhood; I wanted to experience parenthood with him.

I taught myself to find magic in the ordinary.

Contrary to warnings, I found the atmosphere on the pediatric floor charged with hope and optimism.

It was about fiercely being alive.

Becoming a Madoff made me rethink not just who I was, but who I wanted to be.

Life, they showed me, could go on no matter how unpredictable, no matter how unfair.

"To have an entire lifetime of trust destroyed in a single moment was devastating, and for Mark to have found the strength in that moment to set his own betrayal aside and fight back on behalf of all Bernie’s victims took a kind of courage not everyone has."

"My good friend RoseMarie, a public relations consultant who had worked with me at George magazine, sounded the first warning: 'Stephanie, I don’t care if you have a bag from Kmart, I don’t want you to be seen with it.'"

"The emotional blow physically changed Mark from the very first day. His athletic shoulders curled inward, hunching him like an old man, and his boyishly handsome face aged overnight."

"It’s blood they want, not justice."

"Optically, it wasn’t a good idea to eat out. Optically, going to the theater or a concert was out of the question."

"I felt enormously proud that I was with the man who did the right thing."

"Was my life real?" he would often ask.

"You are welcome any time . . . and I really mean that. I am here for you."

"We just have to find a 'new' normal. I love you."

"It just felt so good to be there again. We survived."

The perfect family proved to be, like everything else revolving around Bernie, pure illusion.

What I had initially presumed to be a lack of conflict within their ranks was actually an inability to deal with it.

You might laugh at him, but never with him, over his little idiosyncrasies.

In his mind, Mark’s health scare was all about what a terrible ordeal it was for Bernie.

Ruth could be surprisingly insecure.

A razor-sharp wit had always been Ruth’s suit of armor.

I learned quickly who my real friends were, and held them close.

I had been so proud to be Mrs. Mark Madoff. I loved him and wanted the world to know I belonged to him.

I urged her to look downtown so she could be closer to us.

Mark and I were both old-fashioned about a wife taking her husband’s name, and I had been so proud to be Mrs. Mark Madoff.

Survival is a matter of balance.

Maybe here Mark would snap out of his funk and allow himself to enjoy life’s little pleasures again.

I wanted to earn my wave. I wanted to feel every muscle burn and every nerve tingle.

Moving on and reclaiming the joy in life was much harder for Mark.

I just wanted us to escape, to float away for a brief while in our own fragile little bubble.

My determination was fueled by a deep faith in our justice system.

It didn’t matter what you thought of tobacco companies, or what presumptions or misgivings you harbored about the way they do business; at the end of the day, all that mattered was the truth.

I wanted to find him, reclaim him, and restore us.

You and I have endured more pain than any two people ever should have to.

Nothing is more important than my integrity, and for ten months, I have had to endure a public beating.

"I could actually see the old Mark beneath the sadness that had come to envelop him like a thin, brittle glaze."

"Mark was finally beginning to believe he might be able to pull himself out of the mess his father left behind and rebuild a life for us."

"Being back in the work world had given Mark a sense of purpose and identity again."

"Every free moment was no longer spent tethered to the computer, and I was relieved to see some sparkle again in his hazel eyes."

"We vowed to make the holidays enjoyable again, without the sense of dread that had hung over December for the past two years."

"My heart soared like a lovesick schoolgirl’s when Mark suggested we slip away after New Year’s for a romantic three-day weekend in the Berkshires."

"Mark was allowing himself to feel a sense of optimism and even anticipation."

"He kept saying, 'Let’s focus on that.'"

"I was filled with fear. I couldn’t bear to face the press, face my friends, face living life alone."

"I’m so angry. I’m so angry right now, I just can’t believe it."

I can’t take any more lies. No more lies.

Whatever distrust and ill will there had been between us all these years seemed pointless now.

Her compassion gave me a surge of hope.

I was deeply grateful for Susan’s unexpected solidarity.

I just wanted people to be straight with me, even if I wasn’t going to like what they had to say.

I am begging you to please not cremate Mark.

The hurt Mark had caused me I might someday forgive. But I couldn’t imagine ever forgiving what he did to Nicholas, Audrey, Kate, and Daniel.

I wanted to just get through this service and have it be over.

I wanted to be able to throw away everything when it was over, to have no reminders of the Christmas Mark took his life.

I felt marked by what had happened, as if I was carrying a weight that was both invisible and inescapable.

He never did this thinking for a moment that his torment would become mine.

There are people who never knew Mark Madoff, yet who gleefully point to his suicide as proof that he must have known of or participated in his father’s epic crime.

His death was proof only of his pain.

Once, as he was standing at the island in our kitchen ruminating over some lawsuit or press report attacking his integrity again, he suddenly blurted out that the kids and I would probably be better off without him.

I planned to take just a small portion of the remains and leave the rest for Mark’s four children and brother to have when they felt ready to say their own good-byes.

The cleansing was a gift from my friend Mariana.

You’re safe, Karen said. You’re going to be safe.

I forgive you, I said. I forgive you for leaving us.

It was a peaceful sadness.

What needed to be said had been said now, for both of us.

"Get out of your head and into your body!"

"Leave whatever is not working for you in this room!"

"I refuse to let the events of these past two years define them or affect their entire lives."

"They feel them. When sadness hits them, they literally stop in their tracks to react, and then move on."

"The morning felt fresh and rinsed clean, like sheets drying on a clothesline, and I wondered how Mark could willingly leave this world when there was so much beauty to take in."

"I picked it up and put it in my pocket."

"Hope you have fun fishing."

"Fresh start, new beginning, clean slate: The clichés all make it sound like one big, promising adventure. But building a new life is hard labor."

"I was just beginning to realize that I did, too."

"I will tell them who he was, what he did to so many innocent people, and how he drove their father to his death when they are mature enough to understand and absorb such horrors."