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“‘Someone’s got to be the hero,’ he replied, and walked off across the hull.’
‘Famous last words,’ I muttered.”

“To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be - that was magical.”

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high”

“She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And liken a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”

“She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.”

“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”

“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or so every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available.”

“She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.”

“The wedding he remembers, but of what came after the wedding - for the life of him, he cannot remember anything, except maybe that he drank, slept, fought. So forty years vanished.”

“She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

“‘It’s not fun anymore. I am not you. I need somewhere to stay but the ground is never stable.’
‘The fun is in the jumping, mon amie.’
‘But what if it’s in the landing?’”

“She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seems to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being.”

“Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

“You’ve got a bold solution for everything, but isn’t that because you’re young and haven’t suffered the consequences of what you preach?”

“All we do is philosophize, complain about how depressing life is, and drink vodka. But it’s perfectly clear that to live in the present we’ve got to expiate our past, make a clean break with it. And the only way we can do that is through suffering - suffering and relentless hard work.”

“You, your mother, your uncle - you don’t realize you’re living on credit, at the expense of others, people you won’t let past your front door”

“It’s obvious: the only reason for all our fine words is to pull the wool over people’s eyes - our own included.”

TROFIMOV. Why even talk of pride when man’s physiological makeup is so shoddy, when the overwhelming majority of the species is coarse, ignorant, and profoundly unhappy. It’s time we stopped admiring ourselves and started working.
GAEV. We’re all going to die anyway.
TROFIMOV. Who knows? And who knows what dying means? Maybe man has a hundred senses and when he dies he loses only the five we’re aware of.

“It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.”

“To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”

“Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”

“But amid our nature (it the ‘tonic of wildness’ that Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

“She had been cross with him saying that. As if there were a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own agency in her own life was automatically wrong.”

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

“Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.”

“‘Well you can chose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’”

“‘So you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on facts at all. Some regrets are just . . . ‘ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’

“He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something . . . There’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”

“She turned to the back section about the trials, and read about Charles Manson getting sentenced to death over and over again as if it were a bedtime story. She needed to reassure herself that not all men got away with it, not every time. She read about Charles Mason’s sentencing until her eyes got grainy and she fell asleep.”