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It’s basically about how life sucks and nobody who deserves love ever gets it.
Harriet had never thought of existential crisis as a luxury, but now she did.
How had all this time, decades and decades of it, piled up
with so little resistance?
They had yet to work out how to love her in a grown-up way.
her temperament suited her less to social work and more to tax law, or quality-control inspection, or window number seven at the DMV.
The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.
One thing I learned in prison is that sometimes rotten things fly off people’s tongues because they’re mean, but mostly it’s because they’re scared.
She’d taken the little prize for one reason, plain and simple: she wanted it.
The sunshine feels tart and clean, the city buildings look sharp and bright, and I am suddenly the sort of person librarians recommend books to.
“Again you conclude before evidence,” he says. “Do not conclude. Observe.”
The new feeling was not, as he might have expected, hatred. No. It was dislike. Dislike, plain and simple, without passion. He did not like his wife.
“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”
We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.
Harriet understood that any group, no matter how diverse, eventually acquired a personality; Book Club had decided they were
misunderstood souls born to the wrong era, and William Butler Yeats was their proof.
How could that many bad men live in the world? How could so few have crossed her own path?
It sneaks up on you.”
“The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”
My life unfolded as most lives do, day upon day of doing my best and occasionally my worst, that human continuum.
