Nina looked down and smiled. She’d never felt more at home than she did at Knight’s, with the plentiful sarcasm and soothing rows of book spines. It was heaven on earth. Now, if they could only get rid of the customers and lock the front doors, they’d really be onto something.
Nina could tell from his tone of voice that her new nephew was a morning person, that despicable breed.
Sometimes life is just what it is, and the best you can hope for is ice cream.
Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people – she really did – she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.
Is book smart the only smart that counts?
You do realize it isn’t mandatory to live your life online, right? For thousands of years we managed to be miserable or joyful in private. You can still do it.
Life will throw you major curveballs, but it’s rare you can do much more than duck.
Surely her purpose in life wasn’t simply to read as many books as possible?
Coming out of a book was always painful.
The trivia, the reading, the book club... they were simply weapons of self-defense.
It was one of the paradoxes of parenting that the children you wished you had were actually the versions of your own children that other parents saw.
Was he mad at her? It was so difficult in text, and she wondered if her generation’s reliance on written communication was making them better writers or simply more confused people. Body language told you so much; text on its own was subject to misinterpretation in every way possible. You’d think they’d all get very good at subtletly and vocabulary, in order to make their brief conversations more precise, but she hadn’t noticed that trend.
As a child she’d been told she had ADD, or ADHD, or some other acronym, but her school librarian had simply clicked her tongue and told her she was imaginative and creative and couldn’t be expected to wait for everyone else to catch up.
It’s this occasional hit of success that makes for a real addict. The breakthrough was always imminent; there was always something about to happen. In the dim interstices between flashes of hope you make your life.
Nothing. The first thing you should always do is nothing.
Actually insane, as in mentally ill, or mad as a hatter insane?
She herself, like every woman she knew, only recognized her own youthful perfection in retrospect, with deep regret not for losing it but for not seeing it at the time.
Look, I cleared you a corner.” Tom pointed to an area near a large window. It was dark then, of course, but in the daytime it would get plenty of light. “I was going to surprise you and put a comfy chair there so you could sit and read while I worked, and we could, you know, hang out.” He tugged her closer and kissed her. “I want to be with you the way you are, the way you’re going to be, and the way you end up. Every way you are is beautiful to me.
She’d read somewhere that hurricanes had winds so powerful that a piece of straw could pierce an oak, thrown so hard it became deadly beyond its weight. She was the straw, pushed by forces she only barely understood.
He looked at me thoughtfully, and smiled slowly, his green eyes warm. He smelled of the outdoors, he was so tall and broad shouldered and so... male... in this house of women he was shockingly different. All I could think of was how much I wanted to kiss him. I was clearly losing my mind.