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December 21, 2019 - January 14, 2020
knock hard, because life is deaf.’
“I want to leave sooner than soon,” Rachel whined. “There’s no such thing.” “Yes, there is. It’s called now.”
There were, however, days when it snuck up on her that you could learn a lesson too well.
For some people, it was their job that prompted them to ask Is this it?, and for others, it was the person across the table.
She wondered if it was preordained that her family would break apart again,
He was wrong if he thought he had time. Did he not see that this was how the end began, that it wouldn’t take long for Britt and Rachel to adapt to his absence, to the new space in their house, the new space in their lives? Did he not see that sooner than anyone could anticipate, he would be a satellite circling the planet on which his own family lived?
“Sometimes turbulence is unexpected.”
Karma was merely the demonstrable truism that bad shit happened to everyone if you waited around long enough.
“When you’re in a canoe, you always float downriver. Nothing can change your direction. Something could come along and capsize your boat—rapids, a storm, a fallen tree—but there’s no force in the world strong enough to reverse your course. If you’re on that river, you’re going down that river. I feel like my marriage changed directions on me. It decided to swim upstream. And that feels even more unnatural than if the whole mess just sank altogether.
Even lost, the men in the family still seemed to know the way.
Grief and despair were the heat-seeking missiles of the self-centered,
Although mostly they were closed, and only some were opening, in every direction the doors of summer beckoned.
exceptions don’t prove rules, they disprove them.”
Molly could imagine nothing more profoundly sad than to lie in some lonesome grave while your own mother carried on blindly with the waltz of life.
Age is all in your head,” Davis had said to him. “It sure is,” Mickey had agreed, before adding, “Until it ain’t, kiddo.”
there are tons of motherless daughters out there. If you found some way to write about what happened to you as a kid, how you felt then and how you feel now, I think a lot of good could come of it. For you, for all those women out there who get it,
The more Molly learned about human beings, the less plausible it was to her that a mother would simply walk out on her children and never turn around.
Right there in that greasy spoon, Davis became achingly conscious of the volatility of time. It spun everyone around, holding all of humanity together with great centrifugal motion, until the wear of the tracks and the rust of the bolts flung everyone wildly away from each other into outer spaces.
more strength in returning.” “I’m not convinced that’s true,” Molly said, “but I do think there’s bravery in coming back. What do you think?” “Well, I don’t know anything about bravery,” Richard told her. “But I do know that it’s always easier to stay away.”
“The best and the worst things in life are sudden, Ms. Winger. Everything else takes too damn long,”
“Most people feel undeserving of success,” Jamie said, smirking. “But doesn’t it beat the feeling of undeserved failure?”
And once again, Molly marveled at the vast, limitless ways in which the extroverts failed to grasp the introverts, how the fighters would never understand the fleers.
We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, each one of us tunneling toward something strange. But you—you are nobody’s shadow. And even if you were, a shadow does not belong to the thing that casts it.
“I’m not perfect—far from it—but I have tried all my life not to be a liar.”
after I wrote that letter, I realized that if you want to be the bigger person, all you have to do is act like the bigger person. You don’t have to actually be that person. People make it so hard. They wage war on themselves, they have these little battles in their head. But it really is easy. You just fucking act the part.
“I’m not a diva. I’m just a guy who knows that sometimes in life you have to settle for the moral victory. Those tend to come along more often than actual victories.”
a glitch was precisely what it was, for it had always made him feel defective in some constitutional way.
Davis wasn’t the sensitive type. He was something else. The sensitive type found a piano in the middle of a party and played “Against All Odds.” The sensitive type stewed all weekend after some jerk made fun of his shirt. Davis’s emotional disturbances weren’t personal to him. They were a reaction to the immutable drift of pain, the sorrow that shrouded all lives. Bad things happened in his life—that was sad, but generally solvable. But bad things were constantly happening in everyone’s lives all the time—that was sadness, and it was here to stay.
Molly had yet to fully embrace blind faith in GPS, a technology that still took her breath away. One day everyone looked down, and in the palm of our hand was this machine that knew every single road in the world, and it knew exactly which one you were driving on, and it told you when to turn, and it found you the closest gas station or Subway, and it was the size of a candy bar, and you could take it wherever you went and it still knew exactly where you were, and everyone could have one, and if you plugged it into your car with a flimsy wire, it talked to you, a reassuringly tyrannical female
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So much of life was holding on to the people and the things that rooted you in the world, so that you didn’t have to wake up each day and start anew.
complained about all the flavors of fudge that weren’t chocolate. Fudge is chocolate, he reasoned. It was shameful to contaminate it with Oreos or garnish it with M&Ms. It had no business being white or pink or—God save us all—green.
It was the only real option. When a gravedigger comes to exhume you, only a fool refuses his shovel.
The problem with omens, though, is that you can’t tell the good ones from the bad until the dust settles.
He was too old now to view death as a mere punch line. He’d reached the age where he knew—truly understood—that one day he’d be pulled off into the unbroken nightfall, away from everyone, and he’d stay gone forever.
‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.’”
