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.
In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her.
Bridget saw chaos.
For nine years Paul had not called her by her name. She had always been “Shorty” or “Kid” or “You” to him since she was twelve. It wasn’t until her first night working as a waitress at the yacht club that Alice realized this.
Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.
What business had she to try to capture life and light?
The conversation flowed and stopped and started as it would, a third thing in the room, not quite controlled by either of them, but mostly benevolent.