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The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.
after I had been married long enough that I was married even in my dreams,
Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.
It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.
We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it’s harder to agree on what that is.
Having a worst regret betrays your belief that one misstep caused all your undeserved misfortune.
It’s the ones I didn’t fuck, or didn’t fuck enough, or haven’t fucked enough, that I still dream about.
The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.
My first dozen romances weren’t interesting because I wasn’t learning anything because I was trying so hard not to. I was trying to stop time.
you also learn exactly what to do to enrage each other. It becomes mechanical. The pleasures of a long relationship are the things that you never quite learn about the other—the ways in which you remain strangers.
Everyone considers some part of his own life a universally applicable model, and I’m no exception.
My mind contains a deck of cards, one for each person I’ve ever desired, and for each dream it draws one at random. The trouble is that when I wake up, I take the dream literally.
The well adjusted seem to distribute their fear across their lives, not just keep it in one area, so it seems to disappear.
You can choose your friends but not your friendships.
Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude.
Time and production must bear some relation to each other, but I couldn’t say what it is.
Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.
You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?
After I became a mother I became at once more and less lonely.
