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.
Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.
She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
Time seemed, as it always does in adulthood after a particular stretch has concluded, no matter how ponderous or unpleasant the stretch was to endure, to have passed quickly indeed.
I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony.
Fred!” the nurse said, though they had never met. “How are we today?” Reading the nurse’s name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, “Bernard! We’re mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?
Once I had asked, ‘But are you a Democrat or a Republican?” and Jonathan said, “I’m socially progressive but fiscally conservative,” and Doug Miles, a football player who also came to Sunday breakfast but only ever read the sports section and ignored everyone, lifted his head and said, “Is that like being bisexual?” Which I actually thought was funny, even though I was pretty sure Doug was a jerk.
I’m old enough to know that sometimes you don’t get a second chance.