Good Oil Quotes

“I can't run my own race. I'm constantly checking what's happening in the other lanes.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“She even takes the goings-on of fictitious characters personally.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“I wonder briefly if I could somehow broker a deal with God whereby if I put both my arms around Chris, his suffering would be transferred to me via skin-to-skin osmosis at a rate inversely proportionate to how much I love him.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“The air in my home is heavy with my mom's unhappiness. And her exhaustion. And her sheer dissatisfaction with her life. And I hate it. I can be up in my room when she's in the kitchen below and I feel her despair seeping up through the floorboards. You can hear her banging pots and pans or cursing the vacuum cleaner”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“Oh, well. Love is pain. Or is it beauty is pain? I wouldn't know about the latter, but the former makes my sternum ache.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“You’re very passionate about your unhappiness aren’t you, Chris?’ I responded with, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“I don't watch scary movies. I mean it. Not ever. They make me scared. Scared of being alone in the house. Scared of being alone upstairs at night. Scared of walking home from work in the dark.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“Don’t try to understand other people’s marriages, darling, even your parents’. You’ll be lucky if you understand your own.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“And then you come along with your perfect skin, your freckled shoulders, your glorious laugh, and you lay my entire life to waste.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“Do you know that granola bars are apparently worse for you than chocolate bars? We've been had, Chris, had by the Quaker Oats man.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“Harvey out.
PS I have puny shoulders.
PPS And I’m okay with that.
PPPS I’m not really.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“He would learn to accept his defeat gracefully – unlike Gatsby
with the shotgun – and decide to get on with his life.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“I study his face closely. The smudges under his eyes are darker than usual; his lips are dry and ashen, similar to the rest of his face. It’s been a while between haircuts. Two days’ worth of stubble. He’s beautiful.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“Amelia is Jeremy’s opposite. She’s real. She’s literate. I like her a lot. Or maybe I just like the idea of her. Because she’s so young that she’s out of the question, I can mentally make her into the Perfect Woman in Waiting. Is that what I’m doing?”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“I am getting nostalgic about this night and it hasn’t even finished yet.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“You spoke like me. You got my jokes. You got me. You fucked me senseless. Then you left.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“If you were two years older, I’d be going out with you.” What? What did he just say? I stare at him. He looks at me tenderly with unsteady, bloodshot eyes. “You what?” “I wish you were older,” he says. “You’d be the Perfect Woman.” And he cups my face with his non-vodka-holding hand.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“It costs me a lot of what I used to consider my manhood to say this, but your pleasure was more of a pleasure to me than mine.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“The upshot is that I pretty much don’t have a chance with her. And, you know, thank God, because if I did, I’d have to give up my lifestyle of soul-wrenching loneliness and sexual frustration. I’m too good at it to quit now.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“He may well be my nemesis. And my antithesis! How about that?”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“I had one of those moments when you get nostalgic about something as it’s still happening. Anticipatory nostalgia.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“We don’t always get what we want, do we? Especially with, you know, wanting other people. But it’s worth something to finally see clearly, isn’t it?”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil

“both of them having moved through space and across the parenting continuum to voice their concern for their middle daughter, the one in no-man’s-land between the trenches of childhood and adulthood.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“I sit in my room glowering at the ceiling. I know what this is about, I think. I’m cranky ’cause I’m uncomfortably thirsty for Chris all the bloody time. The heart-twinging excitement of yestermonth is gone. Now it just grates. There is no relief. There is nothing to be done. There is no sign of a parachute.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“It’s interesting how fuming, or anger in general, is such a physical process, like a wave washing up on a beach and then receding.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“You’re pretty passionate about your unhappiness, aren’t you, Chris?” I looked right back at her and said, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“Please accept my apologies for that disgraceful performance. So many f-words. What will my grandchildren think? Probably that their grandpa had his heart ripped out, bloody and still beating, from behind his shattered rib cage by a wily Western Australian. Which is pretty much what happened.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“The yawning six-year chasm between my age and Chris’s is not the only fly in the proverbial ointment of this “loving Chris” business. I’m not even sure what “getting” Chris would involve; all I know is I want him. I want to be enfolded by him somehow, and to possess him. To have unfettered and exclusive access to him all the time. To feel how I feel around him all the time. To know that he loves being around me too. To feel more of his skin on my skin.”
― Laura Buzo, Love and Other Perishable Items

“A nurse and a social worker took fifteen minutes out of their shitty thankless job in the roughest corner of town, sat on a couple of milk crates drinking coffee, flopped their real selves out of the cement and both liked what they saw.”
― Laura Buzo, Holier Than Thou

“Thanks for dinner," I say. "It almost makes up for the bastardry.”
― Laura Buzo, Good Oil