When he takes off his shirt, I see that his shoulders are narrow and his chest almost hairless and almost concave. For a second I’m disappointed but right away I think, Grow up; this is the chest of a husband.
Happiness is a dog sunning itself on a rock. We were not put on this Earth to be happy. We were put here to experience great things.
By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.
Oliver Biddle was who you became if you couldn’t find anyone to love except your parents.
You sense that he’s dangerous but don’t now why – and wonder if it’s because he makes you feel safer than you’ve ever felt.
You can feel that he wants to own you – not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.
The only relationships I haven’t wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.
It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.
He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.
I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.
We are all children until our fathers die.
Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.
I felt I couldn’t lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I’d lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.
He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.
It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He’s like me, just with different details.
The writing is clean. I really wouldn’t have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.
Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.
I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I’d ever experienced-the teachers who’d looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn’t like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.
I feel in some ways I’ve had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.
Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you’ve ever met.