The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

She could see an instrument and understand the power of its beauty, its capacity to bring someone joy, even when she didn’t know a thing about the maker or the quality of the wood.

Marriage for him was like a Sunday lunch—he would never seek it out or even think of it, until someone presented it to him on a silver tray.

It amazed Kate that the human heart could be unlocked in this way, that tolerance and even love could sprout up where both had seemed impossible.

The world seemed so full of warnings about the fact that love could never endure—time flying by, relationships turning sour—but the warnings were like a DANGER: FALLING ROCKS sign on a dark highway at night. You were already there in the middle of it. What were you going to do now, stop driving?

Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status, and success … A woman can easily feel that diamonds are “vulgar” and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry.

you couldn’t spend three decades telling women to want something and then all of a sudden demand that they desire its opposite.

Her longest relationship in life had not been with a man, but with a company.

“Sometimes it just feels like we can’t tell what we’ve given up until it’s too late.”

This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.

“At least it’s something to talk about besides that awful war,” she said.

It delighted her to find that there were still parts of Nathaniel she had yet to discover. It was like realizing that your favorite novel had four extra chapters you’d somehow never noticed before. Gerald understood this, and Evelyn could not imagine a more precious gift.

When he was born, Evelyn had loved those first few moments alone with him. It was the first time in her life that a stranger felt so utterly familiar.

Maybe what Julie saw wasn’t real and never had been; maybe every good quality she imagined in Teddy was simply part of herself reflected back.

“In the first half of the twentieth century, the greatest soloists in the world were Jews from Russia and eastern Europe.

Her sister wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t dumb. She just believed, like a lot of people did, that life was hard enough and there was no reason to trouble yourself with the plight of strangers. Their views of success were fundamentally different. May thought it was measured by what one could amass over a lifetime, instead of how many people one could help.

When people were suffering, their governments would give them weddings or war as a distraction, and sometimes both.

It was important to seek the truth, he told them, even if you only rarely came across it.

Advertising was about the here and now, and sometimes the future, but never the past.

It amazed her how different the surface could be from what one felt beneath the skin. It made her wonder for a moment how a person could ever be certain of anyone else’s true feelings.

It became clear quite quickly that for her, New York was only one person, and without him the city meant nothing.

Here, she wore her nationality like a costume. It was the first thing people saw in her, the only trait that made her special. Nobody cared whether she was funny or sharp or a horrible angry drunk. She was French and that was all.

she had replaced one with the other, as if they were interchangeable pieces instead of men made of flesh and blood.

The sex never slowed down or diminished, as if they both knew this was the only sure, perfect way to understand one another.

This would probably be his son’s last year as a believer, when he had the type of faith that nothing could topple. There was something so goddamn special about that. James wished he could experience the feeling himself again.