Quotations (15)

1 to 15 of 15 items
“He’s not your father,” her mother said with an air of unctuous sympathy. “He’s my sperm donor.” === —love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. === “I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things,…
But the energy that had come off him, cloaked in pleasantries though it may have been, struck her as === “It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.” === Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus…
“But we don’t get what we want, just what we can handle.” === “The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”…
He didn’t live his life, her mother would have said, it lived him. === You want someone to tell you why. Yes. Why there’s pain and loss. Why earthquakes and hunger. But mostly: Why no one gives a shit about you, Rachel. “Stop,” she was…
… she turned to share a look with her newly minted ex-husband, a look if not of two soldiers who’d found a modicum of victory in walking off the battlefield with their limbs intact at least one of common decency. === We age as the rest…
... she never had to worry about him whining or bitching or kvetching in any way. === “I do business with them,” he said. “I do not love them. I do not share the beautiful things in my life with them.” === There seemed to be little rhyme…
A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight. === “Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.” === Where did the brightly colored…
“She did?” Rachel swallowed a scream. === Already a ball of mild hysteria clotted her windpipe when she imagined interacting with the world again, with people, with strangers, with those who could not rescue her, who would run from her…
Laughed the way flood victims and earthquake survivors laughed. Laughed not because something was funny but because nothing was. === My husband is an impostor, she’d say. She imagined some smarmy desk sergeant replying, “Aren’t we all,…
The closest stars were light-years apart, no closer to one another than she was to a tribeswoman of the Saharan steppe in the fifteenth century. === In some time continuum, we’re all dead as soon as we’re born. By that logic, she was long…
Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep. Then I wanted to be a child. === From grade school through high school, college, grad school, and out into the working world, she had assembled herself into a character she…
… she might have been pretty if the skin weren’t stretched so tight against her face it gave her the unfortunate look of someone who’d been struck by lightning during an orgasm. === “This isn’t funny,” she said. He looked over at her.…
“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.” He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is—where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less…
“You still there?” “Had a few birthdays while you were gone,” he said mildly. “Fxcking took you so long?” === “You can’t get mail back once you’ve handed it over. Something to do with interfering with a civil servant on his appointed…
I don’t control anything. I just do a job to put food on my family’s table and I sit up some nights just like every other parent hoping my kids’ lives will be better than mine was. That they’ll have more options than I did.” === A good man…