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Phillip is her baby, and he’s spent his life reeling in the slack as fast as she can cut it for him.
Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
I’ll just get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you’re not yet a complete person.
“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”
THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection.
We have always been a family of fighters and spectators. Intervening with reason and consideration demonstrates a dangerous cultural ignorance.
Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd. What am I thinking?
When it comes down to it, you’ve either got the sort of marriage that will withstand trauma, or you don’t.
You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.
Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can—by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life—but when it comes to marriage, it’s a losing proposition. You will never stop feeling like a gatecrasher at your own party. Instead of feeling lucky, you will spend your life on edge, waiting for the other stiletto to fall and puncture your heart like a bullet.
when the day is taking its first tentative breaths. You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.
Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.
That’s the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.
Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they’re never really gone.
It’s amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.
