More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship. And less there in the one after that, and even less in the one after that one.
That was the trouble with houseguests: they took over a person’s space. They seeped into all the corners.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.
supper might be at five p.m. or eight or not at all. And the dirty dishes piled up in the sink till there weren’t any clean ones left; you had to run a used bowl under the faucet when you wanted your morning cornflakes.”
when you grow up in that kind of chaos you vow to do things differently once you’re on your own.”
it’s not so much about whether a person is messy or neat. It’s whether they’re accepting or they’re not accepting of the way things happen to be. What we accepting ones know to say is, ‘It is what it is, in the end.’
“What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”
Women kept the world running, really. (There was a definite difference between “running the world” and “keeping it running.”)
Under the surface, he thought, maybe he was more like his family than he cared to admit. Maybe he was one skipped vacuuming day away from total chaos.
Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.
“You started finding fault with all I said; you looked bored when I was talking; you acted like everyone else in the room was more important than I was. You had stopped properly valuing me.”
“Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”
He has noticed that his faulty vision most often reveals itself in attempts to convert inanimate objects into human beings.
Not for the first time, it occurs to him that he really should take care of all this before he goes to bed every night. But somehow, at the end of an entire day of doing everything he was supposed to he just runs out of enthusiasm.
