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lambent glow—partly
indecent pink,
ecstatic summons,
serviceable knot;
inky eyes
diffident waitress)
unreasonably handsome,
starry naifs
“is telling someone to relax ever helpful? It’s like saying ‘breathe’ to someone who is hyperventilating or ‘swallow’ to a person who’s choking. It’s a completely useless admonition.”
bottomless bonhomie.
raucous summer
delectably wry,”
dubious charms”)
her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere when she moved through, like a weather front.
largely self-directed,”
He was loath to spend money on anything he thought he could fix himself, and he believed he could fix everything.
one side, an elderly homeless guy was holding a knit cap in his hand and exuberantly addressing passersby with a hearty Hello! Stay dry! Cold one today! And in what Leo thought was a particularly brilliant marketing move, exhorting all the small children to Read a book! “Did you read a book today, young man?” he’d say. “Don’t forget to read a book!”
surge of patriotism that swept through New York after 9/11—the run on American flags by people who would also confess in lowered tones how they’d recently put their place on the market while looking at houses in New Jersey or Connecticut or in their hometowns somewhere in the Midwest, “nobody’s flying a plane into the Gateway Arch.” True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it. But no. Suddenly at every public
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It had all felt frivolous and half-assed and bloated with self-regard.
wondered when twins had become as common as the common cold.
He’d forgotten how good it felt to be interested, absorbed, stimulated.
in flagrante delicto was the phrase that popped into Melody’s head, a flagrant offense.
“Your problem is you’re worried about being everyone’s mirror and that’s not your job.”
“Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others—your sister, your parents—they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them—and vice-versa. It’s normal. I suppose it’s really normal if you’re a twin. But being somebody else’s mirror? That is not your job.”
If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives.
Nothing was a sure thing; every choice was just an educated guess, or a leap into a mysterious abyss. People might not change but their incentives could.
she’d practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way she’d been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn’t there something nearly lovely—when you were young enough—about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? the broken heart signaled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly
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Kübler-Ross stages of grief on a cocktail napkin to chart her breakups with Leo: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
“I’m acting like you’re the most pathetic version of you. Because you are, times a million.” And that was finally what she had to ask herself, Did loving Leo make her a lesser version of herself?
Every day, all day, he felt a kind of vertigo, as if there were nothing holding him up, just a dangerous looming beneath, a valley of regret and waste.
He wouldn’t have called himself an atheist; being an atheist required more belief than he had, a kind of determined certainty about mystery that he didn’t think was feasible or possible, admirable or even desirable. Who could deny a guiding hand of some kind, a design to the world? Calling it science didn’t explain it all to him either. He wasn’t a believer and he wasn’t a nonbeliever. He wasn’t something and he wasn’t nothing. He was a survivor.
