Seating Arrangements Quotes

“Female friendship was one-tenth prevention and nine-tenths cleanup.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“Marriage is difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing you can ever do, besides being a parent, but I think these two fine young people are up to the challenge. Here are two steady, responsible people who, I believe, understand the dire commitment they are about to make and will choose to keep that commitment. Because it turns out to be a choice, commitment-not some done deal. When you leave the alter tomorrow, there will still be a lifetime of choice and temptation and doubt and uncertainty in front of you. I didn't know that at my wedding. Getting married doesn't change you. Marriage changes you.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“He let go, releasing her into a life of her own making.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“Dicky and Maude lived within familiar confines: the Ivy League, the Junior League, The Social Register, Emily Post, Lilly Pulitzer, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Windsor knots, cummerbunds, needlepointed tissue box covers, L.L. Bean, Memorial Day, Labor Day, waterfowl-based décor.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“He had always thought that when sex was over, everything was over between two people. Nothing was taken or left behind with the obvious biological exceptions. Two partners disengaged and went their separate ways. No psychic filaments hung between them, stretching through the miles and days that took them farther and farther from their last encounter. If such things existed the world would be meshed over with them. No one would be able to move. Everyone would be held fast like flies caught in the web. He wanted to think he had taken nothing from Phi and vice versa, but those amorous little filings, that magnetic rust that had responded to her presence might actually be decades old particles of Ophelia Havelland lodged in his inner workings.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“She had seen too many movies; she did not understand that love was a choice, entered and exited by free will and with careful consideration, not a random thunderbolt sent from above.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“This was truly advanced WASP: how to comfort a wronged wife and mother without acknowledging any misdeeds done or embarrassment caused by loved ones.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements