More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Reality was sweaty and ugly. It was deodorant stains on black clothing and cold sore cream and utility bills.
Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.
She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends.
what men feared most was pity, and what women feared most was envy. And it resonated with me. For a guy envy can be empowering, but for a girl it just means you’re going to get attacked or excluded.
Why did she feel the need to make everyone, even this waiter, like her? What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.
“Here’s the thing. We want because we’re wanting. Both senses of the word. The lacking and the longing, all rolled into one. The more you find yourself wanting, the more you want.”
On the back of the bike, the world softened and smeared. She stretched her arms out either side of her and grabbed palms full of solid air. The night was a thousand black butterfly wings beating against her skin. Cleo understood why bikes were so often described as freedom; not for their ability to take you elsewhere, but for the way they transformed the place you already were.
Everyone I know is either more successful or more interesting than me. This realization is nothing new. In fact, it used to feel like everyone I didn’t know was more successful and interesting than me too.
Okay, so I am not pretty. Some people have diabetes. Some people have six toes. Some people get caught in forest fires and suffer third-degree burns all over their body. Some people have headaches they ignore for months, then finally go to the doctor only to find out it’s a brain tumor that kills them within weeks having never achieved their life’s potential. I did not end up pretty. Big whoop.
“I don’t understand this obsession with happiness,” she said. “Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It’s big, it’s unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what’s there to do but come back down?”
Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding all at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.
The quest for individuality had resulted in the opposite: complete predictability.
That was the real inheritance from her mother, she thought, more defining than any facial feature or mannerism. They both wanted to disappear.
Who was she? An artist who didn’t make art. A wife without a husband. A child with no mother.
“People who feel the need to say ‘I’m fine’ are never fine, sweetheart,”
“People are like this too, you know,” he says eventually. “We break. We put ourselves back together. The cracks are the best part. You don’t have to hide them.”
“Do you know the word humiliate comes from the Latin root humus, which means ‘earth’? That’s how love is supposed to feel.”
“Like hummus?”
“Like earth. It grounds you. All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Cleo’s brow furrowed further. So Frank had come because of Eleanor. Of course it had not been for her. And there it was, the feeling she had been trying to deny, the dark, oily jealousy rising in her that Frank would do for Eleanor what he would never do for her. Eleanor got this version of Frank, the sober, thoughtful man who took her suggestions, while Cleo had endured the drunken predecessor like a fool.
