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She believed in second chances, sometimes more than first chances, which were wasted on youth and indiscretion.
he always felt lucky to be exactly where he was, the place he’d chosen to belong.
“Appearances count,” she would tell their kids. “If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”
She wished she knew what a mimic thrush mimicked and whether titmice ate mice. She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.
it was fun to do something new, something without a particular result or pressure to perform attached.
Outrage, Jack learned, was not an aphrodisiac; it was exhausting.
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.
Matilda grew up knowing that you didn’t get anything without giving something up. In her world, that was the prevailing logic. It was just a matter of knowing how much you were willing to lose, how many pounds of flesh, which in her case would be literal.
In the past, he’d always been able to thrive in this place, the familiar sweet spot of avoidance, keeping a million plates spinning until they all gradually fell and he quickly moved along to something shinier, but this felt different.
She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.
The softness that had taken root between them since the night of the snowstorm and slowly blossomed into something expansive and occasionally exuberant had collapsed—not a slow leak either, but a sudden deflation, like a sad, sunken soufflé.
They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s why addicts stayed addicts.
Evenness defined his present, the by-product, he often thought, of small minds and safe living.
If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives.
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 insignificant.
Did loving Leo make her a lesser version of herself?
though she didn’t understand the heady optimism moving through her (she hoped it was her new work, but maybe it was just the sway of the dock? the swell of the water? Paul?), she decided to embrace it. To bear her own joy.
