Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes. Horns, flaccid and come too late. Metal crumpling like tissue. The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere. Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.
She used to say that a bad marriage was one that hadn’t had enough time to get good again.
The first time Marian Wallace came to see me, I was five months pregnant. She had Maya with her, and the baby was about two.
I go to Marian Wallace’s dorm room, and I throw the book on her bed. I tell her, ‘Look, you can sell this. It’s worth a lot of money.’ And she looks at the book dubiously, and she says, ‘Is it hot?’ And I say, ‘No, it belongs to Daniel, and he wants you to have it, but you can never say where it came from. Bring it to an auction house or a rare-books dealer. Claim you found it in a used-books bin somewhere.
Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t share your sensibilities and interests.
To begin, it is narrated by Death!
I’ve made so many mistakes,’ she says. ‘I can’t help you,’ I say. She shakes her head and picks up the baby. ‘We’ll be out of your way now,’ she says. ‘Merry Christmas.’ “And they leave. I’m pretty shaken up, so I go into the kitchen to make myself some tea. When I get back out to the living room, I notice that the little girl has left her backpack and Tamerlane is on the floor next to it.
An e-reader! I’ve wanted one for a really long time.” She shoots a quick look over to her father. He nods, though his eyebrow is twitching slightly. “Thanks, Nana.” Maya kisses her grandmother on the cheek.
He’s got one thick book. He’s in the middle of Infinite Jest. You ever heard of it?
The way I see it,” Lambiase says, “you saved A. J. Fikry’s life when you stole that manuscript. That’s the way I see it.” “What kind of cop are you?” Ismay asks. “The old kind,” he says.
We are that we love.
Maybe we’ll meet again, when we are slightly older and our minds less hectic, and I’ll be right for you and you’ll be right for me. But right now, I am chaos to your thoughts and you are poison to my heart.
And she always wants to read the same book. And it’s, like, the crappiest board book. The Monster at the End of This Book?
Life is messy. Deal with it. If you’re judging it, you’re not really seeing it” -Dr. Lau.
If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.
When you have little, mine Aviva, you learn to take care. When you have much, you must accept that you could someday have little,” she would say. “To take care of something is to love it.
When small wounds are left untreated, they can fest and become far more serious injuries.” -Mr. Kipling.
He had spent hours with the man over the last half-dozen years. They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
You love your daughter, but you have fewer choices than you once did. Your choices are dictated by her. Maybe not fewer choices. Maybe it’s that the answers are more obvious, so you don’t pose the questions. Life unspools more inevitably.
What I mean to say is that you can make a choice, be reasonably satisfied with it, and still regret that which you did not choose. Maybe it’s like ordering dessert. You have it narrowed down to either a warm peanut butter torte or strawberries jubilee. You choose the torte, and it’s delicious. But you still wonder about those strawberries...