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“If Roger thought you were being unfaithful, then he’s the one with the problem, not you.”
“You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t… you can’t live without each other.”
“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?” “No.” “You’re never more important than you are then.”
When you’re a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it. That you have to have opinions all the time, you have to decide which party to vote for and what wallpaper you like and what your sexual preferences are and which flavor yogurt best reflects your personality. You have to make choices and be chosen by others, every second, the whole time. That was the worst thing about getting divorced, in the bank robber’s opinion, the fact that you thought you were done with all that, but now you had to start making
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anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can.
If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
although you might be able to drum religion into people, you...
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Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.
“How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?” He replied the way a child who’s heard the same joke a thousand times does: “One bit at a time, Mom.”
“We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to… be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”
that’s the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you toward your destination.
for some reason it’s always the people with the most impressive diplomas who keep them in their desk drawers.
“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
“Don’t do anything silly.”
Because the people we argue with hardest of all are not the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all.
Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.
“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”
“Do you think God’s going to protect you against knives just because you’re a priest?”
“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
The truth? It’s hardly ever as complicated as we think. We just hope it is, because then we feel smarter if we can work it out in advance.
“Have you got a mortgage on it?” “Hasn’t everyone?” “No. And a mortgage used to be something you were expected to repay. But now that every other middle-income family has a mortgage for an amount they couldn’t possibly save up in their lifetimes, then the bank isn’t lending money anymore. It’s offering financing. And then homes are no longer homes. They’re investments.”
“It means that the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can’t. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, ‘How can they afford that?’ because everyone is living beyond their means. So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you’ve already got. With borrowed money.”
“I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost.
“How do you manage to have such a long marriage?” she asked. “You fight for it,”
“You have to listen to each other all the time. But not all the time. If you listen to each other all the time, there’s a risk that you can’t forgive each other afterward.”
We weren’t allowed to argue just for the sake of winning. Because, sooner or later, that would end up with one of us winning. And no marriage can survive that.”
He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.
you’ve lived with teenagers, you know they only exist for themselves, and their parents have their hands full dealing with the various horrors of life. Both the teenagers’ and their own. There was no place for Estelle there, she was mostly something of a nuisance. They were pleased that she answered the phone when they called on her birthday, but the rest of the time they assumed time stood still for her. She was a nice ornament that they only took out at Christmas and Midsummer.
People’s dreams are always at their grandest when they’re looking for somewhere to live.
“Life goes so fast. Working life, anyway,”
He said you don’t have to lead by telling other people what to do, you can lead by just letting them do what they’re capable of instead.
If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you’ve done a good job.”
“Young people today. You’re so aware of how you affect your children. I heard a pediatric doctor say on television that a generation ago, parents used to come to him and say ‘Our child’s wetting the bed, what’s wrong with him?’ Now, a generation later, they come to him and say ‘Our child’s wetting the bed, what’s wrong with us?’ You take the blame for everything.”
“We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”
‘You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime!’ ”
nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”
“Your child’s going to be absolutely fine, you’ll see. And absolutely fine can cover any number of peculiarities.”
Estelle was thinking about another author now, one who almost a hundred years ago wrote that your children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
“You’re going to be fine. You don’t have to love being a mother, not all the time.”
humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive,
That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.
“Because you dance with the person you went to the party with.
She had spent her life working and rushing home, working and rushing home, and always felt guilty for not being good enough in either place.
Everybody has to start somewhere!”
You’re good enough.”
“That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”
“Obviously I can’t set a good example to my daughters and teach them not to do idiotic things now. But I might at least be able to show them how you take responsibility for your actions.”
How do you eat an elephant?” “I don’t know.” “A bit at a time.”
