Love is the world’s infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood. – Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION.
I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.
It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thorn bush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.
The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right experts.
Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood?
She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad.
Everyone has a moment when life goes off the rails.
Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.
My mother had always told her kids: if you’re about to do something, and you want to know if it’s a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.
Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.
I’m a huge fan of ghost stories, that sort of slow build, the suspense and the questioning about whether you’re imagining something or if it’s real.
Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
Don’t be discouraged – every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.
My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don’t need to give myself the willies. I’m quite good at that – I can freak myself out wherever I am.
There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.
There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
I like the discipline of writing a script. You can’t go into the character’s head – you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they’re thinking.
It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.