The Husbands Quotes

“She doesn't always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“There is a time, she thinks, at the start of any relationship, when the process of falling in love softens a personality, like wax in a warm room. And so two people in love change, just a little, pushing their wax figures together, a protuberance here smoothed down but creating a dip there. It doesn’t last long, the time when love can gently change who you are, and in the relationships that she’s visited over the last six months, the moment has long passed. She has been presented with the shape of her new husband, and invited to either contort to fit or reject him wholesale.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“It must be nice to be that sure of anything, to risk the mistake, to have the big party.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She has always hated being wrong, the idea of doing something that turns out to be an irredeemable mistake.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“For a while when she was with Amos she wanted to be married, but not for the wedding, just for the certainty. Just for the feeling of a mind made up. She wanted to know that if something went wrong her first thought would be How can I fix this? and not Should I leave?”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“If someone hates the world, and you’re the only exception, then surely that proves something.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Sooner or later, somebody has to want something, and then admit to it.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She is a vegetarian but not when she's drunk.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She does that thing you do sometimes of getting super polite when someone says something you think is stupid.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She’s chosen her husband. She hasn’t met him, but she’s chosen him. And if he’s not right, she’ll get out of it the old-fashioned way: an immense pile of onerous legal chores that wear her down over the course of many months, and a determination to keep it cordial that ultimately collapses over a missing vase that they both fixate on as a metaphor for their mutual failings.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She has always thought of her willingness to go along with things, her outsourcing of decisions to friends and circumstance, as passivity, not courage. But observed and described by this man she likes so much, she can almost believe in herself as someone with an audacious spirit.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“If there's an answer she's hoping for, probably she should just do that. Probably she shouldn't defer to a flower. No more tricks, no more dodging: she wants something, and she's going to have to admit it.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“This is the life she would design if she was drunk and trying to think through the best possible version of who she could be. Exercise every morning and some evenings too, knowing what to do with root vegetables, spending a lot of time with her niece and nephew, staying in better touch with her mum, this is stuff she's sure she's written on intentional lists in the past, and now she's doing it.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“For a while when she was with him, she wanted to be married, but not for the wedding, just for the certainty. Just for the feeling of a mind made up.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Yeah, I think I’ve got to accept that I’m absolutely into marriage as a concept, but I’m also into being the sort of person who isn’t into marriage as a concept, as a concept. This whole situation makes it hard to trick yourself about what you’re like.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Not that London isn't great too," he says, generously, with an expansive gesture that takes in the worst of the local fish-and-chip shops, a puddle, a dead pigeon, a carpet shop that has been there for as long as she remembers but which she has never once seen open, and a tree that's still just bare branches even though it's almost May.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“In the years before the first husband emerged from the attic, she had felt the burden of long singleness lying upon her. Being happy to be single had felt obligatory, a statement of feminism or autonomy or just a way to head off coupled friends who she didn't want feeling sorry for her. The weight of that requirement had made it difficult, sometimes, to figure out how she really felt.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She will send nobody back for a bad T-shirt or a haphazard approach to home deodorizing, for cutting his own hair, for rewatching The Wire, for filling the living room with Funko Pops.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“It’s the thrill of being able to do what she likes, of not having to figure out what a husband wants to do, what his expectations are, how they behave together, who sits where on the sofa, how he takes his tea and which mugs he likes, whether she should check before having her friends over, whose toothbrush is whose (a nightmare, every new husband).”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“You can't stay married to someone forever just because they climb out of your attic one afternoon.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She’s had so many lives, and some of them were bad, but a lot of them were good, and maybe there isn’t a single best path forward that she has to find.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Some people speak as if their every word is conjured anew, never repeated from past conversations; they create their thought and hand it to you like a cross-stitched bookmark.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Architect, though! What a perfect job for a husband. Ambitious yet concrete, artistic yet practical, glamorous yet without an industry-wide drug problem.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She doesn't like that her body keeps changing like this, without her say-so, not just the world but herself in it.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“and maybe there isn’t a single best path forward that she has to find.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“She is suddenly angry; how dare he appear in her home only to leave, making a face like he thinks she's sad to see him go? She never thinks of him these days. She can't even remember what they used to do together other than standing in a corner and inventing new ways to feel better than everyone else. Their whole long relationship is baffling to her.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Ela teve muitas vidas, e algumas foram ruins, mas várias foram boas, e talvez não haja apenas um único caminho a seguir.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Toby e Maryam chegam às sete. Ela se dá conta de que sabe coisas sobre eles que nem eles mesmos sabem. Mas os dois sempre estão juntos, em todos os mundos.”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Queria ter em mente que se algo desse errado seu primeiro pensamento seria Como podemos consertar isso? e não: Será que devo terminar?”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands

“Para Terry, meu marido favorito”
― Holly Gramazio, The Husbands