There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.
She remembered me.′ This was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug.
I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You’re fine and we’re fine. I hope it’s true.
The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.
She was so much softer then, so much more willing to fall in love, or believe she was.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks. The traffic signal that said walk the second you got there, that happened to every person in the course of a day.
I think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevobably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much happiness ensued.
Sometimes when she thought of Eric, and now more powerfully when she saw him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn’t retrieve them when they were gone.
In this present body he hadn’t been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself.
I feel like I should love them right away. But how do you do that? You can’t make yourself love someone, can you?
Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?
Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she’d forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.
She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn’t torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple.
Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms.
Tibby, you are crazy,” Carmen said. “Those pants are in love with you. They want you for your body and your mind.” She couldn’t help seeing the pants in a completely new way.
Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures.
Why couldn’t it belong to him anymore? Why couldn’t he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.
Because they forgot and I remembered. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.
It was endlessly tricky being in the know. It was a state Carmen had a achieved with a certain bravado, but she found it difficult to maintain. Without Jones, she could easily slip out of the know, relapse into her natural eagerness, and probably never get hired for another part in her life.
By day she studied and touched her mother’s things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together.