There are people we treat wrong and later, we’re prepared to treat other people right.
If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That’s the entire story, and if he doesn’t kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.
I don’t think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, “I need a little more psychological realism.”
I feel like as I’ve gotten older I’ve unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.
Anyone who’s really interested in anything spends time alone.
I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn’t want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.
And I am pretty sure that’s the point of reading fiction – so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you’re not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?
Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose – what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events? – and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.
I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.
If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.
Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.
I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.
She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him; when you get down to it, can you say that about many people?
When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
There’s a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you – that both are inherently unfeminist. I don’t agree. There’s no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.