Melissa Bank > Quotes

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You don't need a reason to forgive... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do. ”
― Melissa Bank

“We are all children until our fathers die.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“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. ”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything.
After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me.
Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’
‘That was him.’
Jake shakes his head.
‘What?’
‘He’s not for you,’ he says.
I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know?
‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’
Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Dante's definition of hell: proximity without intimacy. From the Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing”
― Melissa Bank

“With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had.

I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson.

"Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“She seems sort of lost.'

I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“i realize i will never hear from dena again, and i will never call her. it gives me a chill. it is a strange thing to end a friendship, even if you know it's what you want. it's like a death; all of a sudden your experience of a person become finite. ”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.”
― Melissa Bank

“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. ”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said.
I smiled.
"What?"
I said, "I was just thinking of your father.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I said, "It's not like that." I wanted to convince her. I said "We think alike."

Oh, my dear," she said. "A man thinks with his dick.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“It was the opposite of love, and yet it wasn't love I was opposed to but the murmurs that said, This is your chance, which seemed less like the promise of a door opening than the threat of one sealing shut.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.”
― Melissa Bank

“You smell like a bar," he said.
I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, "You smell like a poem.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“Today was the first day of the rest of my life. It was okay, I think the second day of the rest of my life will be better”
― Melissa Bank

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“The elevator door opens right into the loft. I was counting on those extra few seconds of hallway before facing the party, the party we are now part of and in, a party with people talking and laughing and having a party time. I think, I am a solid, trying to do a liquid's job.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“The women are young, young, young, liquidy and sweet-looking; they are batter, and I am the sponge cake they don't know they'll become. I stand here, a lone loaf, stuck to the pan. ”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“But when you hear that he can't hear you, you can see that he can't see you. You are not here and you haven't even died yet.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He loves New York, he says. 'It's like Oberlin--it's where people who don't belong anywhere belong.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Well," I said, "I have to go."
He said, "Can I call you?"
I waited a long time before answering, though not, of course, as long as he'd made me wait. I let him stand there with the question in the air while I took a good long look at him, let him stand there while I stepped to the street and raised my arm for a cab. At exactly that moment, as though dispatched by some god I didn't really believe in anymore - the god of drama or god of perfect things - or maybe by my own fairy god god, a cab came. I got in, and closed the door.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“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.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into cab, every runner along the river,every motorcycle coming and going.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Bored .... nearly to death”
― Melissa Bank

“When you're out" She advised, "try to appear captivated.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Oliver Biddle was who you became if you couldn't find anyone to love except your parents. ”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Ce Français avec qui je sortais.
- Je l'avais oublié, dit-elle. Comment il s'appelait, déjà ?
- Enfoiré, dis-je.
- Exact.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“New York est la ville où l'on se sent chez soi quand on est de nulle part.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He didn't remember because he'd seen thousands of little fish hundreds of times, and because it didn't mean to him what it had to me.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“When I could talk, I said, "I don't know what I did wrong."
Dena sighed, "You care too much.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

“It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one.
It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot