There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.
He realized that there was a point to that ungainly empty area between the human shoulder and chin: it was the perfect place to rest an infant.
Wasn’t this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?
He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.
You could argue they’d lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.
When one of you wanted one life, and the other wanted something completely different, there was a technical term for that: irreconcilable.
Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn’t recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am.
All my life I had known one thing for sure about myself, and that was that my life would never be her life. I had moved as far and as fast as I could; now I was back at my beginning.
You know what the opposite of ‘rise and shine’ is Bridge? ‘Good night, and good luck.
They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure.
You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.
No one, not even my father, not even my children, has ever loved me the way that man loved me, that’s for sure. There’s something satisfying in being loved that hard, maybe more than loving that hard yourself.
Begin the work of becoming yourself.
Dogs makes messes, it’s true, but they clean them up as well.
People froze you in place... More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it.
I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During.
All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.
In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that’s left of me.
But once there were children, you couldn’t zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.