Every time you answer the phone, someone is crying, someone is raging, someone is begging you to solve their problems.
I had waited for the tears to stop before I called him, waited until my whole body was empty and dry, hard as a fist. But now I felt the sadness rising again in my chest.
Marriage is the most expensive ticket to nowhere.
Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.
This is the truth about things: If you take something that isn’t yours, it will never belong to you. You can try to hold on to it, but somehow, it will slip through your fingers. If something wasn’t meant to be yours, it won’t be. No matter what you do to keep it, you will lose it.
That was the problem with getting used to people – you had to miss them when they were gone.
But the places we come from don’t leave us as easily as we leave them.
Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take the moment and make it perfect!
They will stare. They will stand to the side and watch her be alone.
We would pay the bills. We would pretend to be high-class. This was compromise. This, I guessed, was business.
In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone.
At home, Tommy tried to avoid looking too long at himself in the mirror, for his reflection stirred in him a feeling of great loneliness and a fear that this loneliness might be permanent.
And in that foggy place between sleep and waking, he could have been anyone. That was what she liked most about him: In the darkness, he became whomever she wanted.
You live like comfortable strangers. Like characters in a play.
The whole wide world was just a big pile of strangers, thinking all the time about everything they were missing.