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Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings.
The policeman tries to be patient. He presses his thumbs hard against his eyebrows, as if he hopes they’re two buttons and if he keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he’ll be able to restore life to its factory settings.
At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.
Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”
“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”
Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
Then they got older. Sometimes he managed to forget that for a moment and found himself reaching to hold their hands. They were so embarrassed. Him too. It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.
Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.
It’s easier to talk about work when you haven’t quite got the words to talk about the other things in life, but obviously those words apply to both things at the same time.
Jack has been thinking about the bridge ever since the hostage drama started, because during his best nights he still dreams that the man didn’t jump, that Jack managed to save him. Jim thinks about the same bridge all the time, because during his worst nights he dreams that it was Jack who jumped instead.
He comes back with two more cups. Not that Jack drinks coffee, but he understands that it occasionally means something to his father not to have to drink alone.
Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and
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The bank robber often thinks about that to this day. Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can’t hate your mom. That it still doesn’t feel like it was her fault.
Naturally, Jim did his best to act like he definitely had experience, seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.
The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.
Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.
if Jack had been any other man’s son, Jim would most likely have agreed that it wasn’t a bomb. But you don’t take any risks if the son is your own son.
If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind,
They’re not the captives here. I am.
“Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.” ZARA: Do people
“And… winners earn a lot of money, which is also important, I assume? What do you do with yours?” “I buy distance from other people.”
“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”
You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal.
All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in there became impenetrable.
A thoughtless adult had told her that a person who’s drowning doesn’t look like they’re drowning. “When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying.” Nadia had felt like that all her life.
Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it.
“Like I keep saying, I don’t know anything! My dad’s going to die, and I’m going to be a parent, and I want to be exactly the same sort of parent he is, and I didn’t get around to asking him how to do it.
“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.”
Estelle knew no better way of saying that she cared about people than to ask if they were hungry.
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.
The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.
But Jack always calls his sister what she is: a heroin addict. She’s seven years older than him, and with that age gap you don’t have a big sister when you’re little, you have an idol. When she left home he couldn’t go with her, and when she tried to find herself he couldn’t help, and when she went under he couldn’t save her.
Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.
“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.”
One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos. Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we’re far more inclined to carry on even faster. We’ve created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we’re going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.”
if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
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.
“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
“Apartments aren’t supposed to be investments,” Zara replied gloomily. “What are they supposed to be, then?” “Homes.”
Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?”
She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison.
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.
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.”
They talked about that man on television as if it was the bridge’s fault. Roger was very upset about that. Bridges exist to bring people closer together, he said.”
it was the first time in ages that she’d thought about how they fell in love. You tend to forget that when you’re in the middle of the life that follows,
And I… damn, I love being boring with Ro. Does that sound mad? I love arguing with her about sofas and pets. She’s my everyday. The whole… world.”
“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. 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.”
