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Our grandmothers would often tell us that no matter how much you envy someone, if everyone threw their package of problems into the center of a room and was given a choice of anyone else’s, you would, guaranteed, pick up your own.
they were both silent for a singular moment. That silence contained half a century of mutual, shared dread.
Nobody who has a life built like a fortress can go to therapy, much less couples therapy, much much less with the therapist of the person he had a nonacrimonious but nonetheless sad parting of a partnership with.
Noelle was a repressed Presbyterian, or just a Presbyterian, and would never share as uncomplicated or direct a thought as “Yes, I’m angry at you, and here is an explanation for why.” Her ancestors had left their ability to share their feelings on the Mayflower and had never called lost luggage to pick it up.
You don’t actually talk about things you know about people; you just live with the knowledge and allow it to ride quietly in the backseat of your relationship.
You can’t fight with someone you don’t actually say anything to.
That’s what an old person funeral is like: Someone as old as Phyllis was always going to die, and it was the mourners who dictated the Tragedy of Death vs. Celebration of Life index of the day.
In the Tragedy of Death vs. Celebration of Life lottery, the winner was going to be the less frequent but always memorable third option: Character Assassination of the Dead Before She Is Even in the Ground.
People think that getting fired is the opposite of promotion, but it’s actually this—stasis—that’s promotion’s opposite.
“First generation builds the house, second generation lives in it, third generation burns it down.”
There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them. That was a surprising thing about fatherhood that Nathan had not anticipated.
“Do you know who Gershom Scholem was? He was a Jewish philosopher. He wrote about Kabbalah and Shabbtai Zvi and antinomianism. He spoke once about something called a plastic hour, that there are these times in our lives when everything is soft and malleable. We tend to suffer during these times, but his point was that actually, these plastic hours are times when you can make actual change.” “What change?” “Whatever change is necessary. For the better. This is a time when you can become better.
“I think that every family is its own Bible story. Every family is its own mythology. The people that were written about in the Torah—that’s just a document from a period of time. If the Torah had gone on, perhaps we’d all be included in it.
What is it about shame that it always feels like the truth?
The ghosts of a family’s troubled past will play out riotously in the soul and on the body of each member of that family in myriad ways.
when he was faced with what was absolutely and incontrovertibly an emergency—one that no one could argue with—this is when the world finally started making sense to him. The anxiety and fear were the only things that were real to him; they were the only things that never abandoned him. And when everyone else got to feel them, too, well, that was when he could finally relax.
Jenny’s whole life, she thought that they had chosen each other, that it was a terrific kind of coincidence that they were both born into the insanity of this family. But they hadn’t chosen each other; they didn’t even have to choose each other. They had been chosen for each other, and now they lived in the kind of exquisite stuckness you can’t even opt out of.
the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better?
