There was a Dana Phelps with a son named Brandon, but they didn’t live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Phelpses resided in a rather tony section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Brandon’s father had been a big-time hedge fund manager. Beaucoup bucks. He died when he was forty-one. The obituary gave no cause of death. Kat looked for a charity – people often requested donations made to a heart disease or cancer or whatever cause – but there was nothing listed.
Here is the truth about tragedy: it’s good for the soul.
Some things we pack away, stick in the back of the closet, never expect to see again – but we can’t quite make ourselves discard them. Like dreams, I guess.
Children view their parents as both intrepid and omnipotent.
Feeding teenage boys was like filling a bathtub with a grapefruit spoon.
Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued.
The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered – shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no.
Love your parents – while we are busy growing up, they are growing old.
There is silence, and then there is rural silence, silence you could feel and reach out and touch, silence with texture and distance.
When you’re young you don’t get how great it is to be loved unconditionally.
There are virtually no major life decisions you make that are not in some way based on your finances.
We humans can’t see straight. We are always biased. We always protect our own interests.
Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God’s blank canvas, the sun a soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.
When you can see the stakes, when you realize the true purpose of your mission, it motivates you. It makes you focus. It makes you push away the distractions. You gain clarity of purpose. You gain strength.
Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.
The Bad Man isn’t lurking in playgrounds, kiddies. He lives in your house.
It was true what they said: The older you become, the more you are like your parents. Soon he’d be telling a kid not to stick his elbow out the car window or he’d lose it.
Terrific,” Simon said. “The psychos are on my side.
But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school – where is she now? It didn’t happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation. So.
One time Clu tried to explain it to me,” Enos continued. “‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to escape the world; sometimes you want to escape yourself.’ ” He cocked his head. “Do you believe that?” “Not really,” Myron said. “Like a lot of cute phrases, it sounds good. But it also sounds like a load of self-rationalization.