She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn’t willing to risk...
She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.
Love is like war; easy to begin, hard to end.
What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.
Everything good requires sacrifices.
But like everything else, love changed.
How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time.
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.
Lena always described how she dreaded and mourned things before they even happened. Carmen was beginning to suspect that she was permitting herself to mourn this long separation only now that it was over.
She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.
She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one.
A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.
There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn’t quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren’t under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you’d have to land eventually.
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn’t get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn’t escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.
Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.
Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.
She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.
His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.
She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who’d lost nothing, was not.
Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn’t easily cross.