Darin Strauss > Quotes

“The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.”
― Darin Strauss

“I have come to love you in spite of---" Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng: A Novel

“Things don't go away. They become you.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Self-hate is rarely unconditional.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.”
― Darin Strauss, More Than it Hurts You

“What's impossible to communicate, what you can't experience unless you're part of it, is the sensation of being in a real-life marriage. Even little chats seem to be floating in some kind of really ast liquid, and that vast liquid is the ocean of shared feelings and memories and shorthands, of understanding and misunderstandings between the couple-- their history ocean. More and more of their business tends to go underwater, and so even the important words feel only like individual waves popping up from that ocean. All that context, that history, and those impressions from real life that the couple logs and drowns in, it all washes over everything”
― Darin Strauss, More Than it Hurts You

“I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng: A Novel

“Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.

But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate.”
― Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng: A Novel

“Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“this empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body.”
― Darin Strauss, More Than it Hurts You