Half a Life Quotes

“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Things don't go away. They become you.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.

But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Self-hate is rarely unconditional.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Maybe I could have done fifty things to avoid the accident. Left the car in the garage that day. Hurried through a yellow light that I'd stopped at. Gone to the beach instead of mini-golf. Been alone, not talking to friends. But I did all those things, and Celine hadn't done the many things she could have to avoid the accident, either. All the things get done and you regret them and then you accept them because there's nothing else to do. Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“We can try our human best at the crucial moment, and it might not be good neough.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the coll mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“In fiction classes... you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence... But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare... The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do much noticing.”
― Darrin Strauss, Half a Life

“His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren't right even as he couldn't stop presenting them.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“If your relationship fills you with a sense of luck, you've chosen well.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life: A Memoir

“The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register?”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Looking back now, there's something that bothers me abut the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn't Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual's quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine's death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable. The school part of our lives continues to be the school part for eighteen years, the work parts stay the work parts, and if we're lucky nothing disarranges them; the small inconsistencies get buried under talk, explanations, rescheduling. If everything couldn't continue as planned, no real plans could be made.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you didn't risk your face in the mirror.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“Your muscles can tense with hope.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“We’re all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that’s the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we’re riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. So it’s an epiphany after all. You have it in your hand the whole time.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life: A Memoir

“She’s both striking and practical, somehow, like the string of rope lights around the banister that dangles and loops and steers you upstairs to a nighttime party. This”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life: A Memoir

“What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register? I slept soundly.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“The part of the brain that isn't automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feelings: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It's not so much even a type of seriousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by slow degrees. I've never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self hate is rarely unconditional.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life