Same As It Ever Was Quotes

“Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“but the strangest thing I remember about having young children is how interminably the time moves, just these days upon days upon days, and every single one of them feels a million years long, but then suddenly months have gone by, enough time for a new baby to be born or one of the kids to start kindergarten, or college for God’s sake, and it— The amount of time I’ve lost contemplating that passage of time is—well, really kind of astounding.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She has always vacillated between feeling things too deeply and not feeling them at all, so she learned, at a young age, how to steel herself; she could stop herself from feeling, she found, if she tried hard enough. It became a muscle she could flex, hardening herself against any unwanted onslaught of disappointment, and it works, too, to prevent crying in public.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“just loneliness, loneliness at their respective outsets that colored everything else; or proximity, or passion; or hurting each other, or watching both their children leave the nest, or deciding to keep coming home to each other at the end of the day. Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion. The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed, in the hours after their son is born and the hours before his wedding.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“You’ve progressed beyond her understanding,” he says. “Our kids are always, one day, going to progress beyond our understanding; don’t you think?”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She feels, too, unbelievably tired, stymied by gravity; so much of motherhood has, for her, been this particular feeling, abject disbelief that she’s not only expected but obligated to do one more thing.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Isn’t that part of what defines every relationship? That mixture of how much you need someone and how much they need you back? It’s never an equal amount. And it fluctuates—ideally it does—because both of those things are exhausting in their own right. You needed me more than I needed you then, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t need a friend too. That I didn’t benefit from having you in my life. Of course I did.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“It’s a chemistry thing, isn’t it? Don’t you sometimes just feel something for another person? Like you were meant to have found them? That’s how I felt about you when we met. Like I already knew you.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“I’m desperately unhappy. Congenitally ungrateful. Awash in constant panic, perpetually worried that maybe it’s always going to be this way.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Her partner in crime, Ben. The one who’d accompanied her complicitously through the darkest and most shameful moments of her adult life: cradled in her arms as she wandered woozily around the apartment at night, entertaining thoughts of disappearing while she slowly hummed him pop songs; strapped into the backseat while she wept in the parking lot of the Whole Foods; taking over when she got too tired to finish reading to him from Harry Potter, too young to read but making up the story as he saw fit—then he found a werewolf in the woods, and it was really funny and then really scary but mostly funny ha ha ha and then everyone went to bed, the end, Mama. Mama? “Mom,” he says now, and she wonders if he ever remembers the late-night times of his toddlerhood when she would creep in and lift him from his bed and rock him back to sleep in the glider, Mama’s nuts about you, chipmunk. Mama wouldn’t understand the world without you in it.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“It can be hard to tell, in the suburbs, whether an eccentrically clad woman carrying around a single organic cabbage is nomadic or expensively disheveled.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“she and Mark had a standing dinner date every other Wednesday, a whole stupid rigamarole where she put on lipstick and didn’t let herself wear a nursing bra and they went to Randolph Street or Lincoln Park or occasionally some exalted hole-in-the-wall in a distant and ominous suburb, and during the drive they talked about all the regular boring things that regular boring parents talked about while dating under duress, though they’d both rather have been sleeping or masturbating or watching The Sopranos on separate televisions:”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“You were supposed to want that; she knew this. You were supposed to want everything for your kid and the dregs for yourself.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“It was a cliché to be this person; she got bored just thinking about it, the sadness over nothing, the fact that she was resentful of the easiest life in the world. And yet she couldn’t help herself.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“The dog whines, and Julia leans down and lifts her up. “Don’t cry,” she says into Suzanne’s fur. “You shouldn’t police her emotions,” Alma says, but then, frowning, asks, “Are you okay?” It’s a rare display of interpersonal concern as far as Alma goes, and Julia wishes for a second that she weren’t okay, that she could call upon her daughter for some kind of nontraumatic assistance, splinter removal or a dislocated shoulder, something that would require close bodily contact with this person she’s borne, so long as Alma is—such a rarity from her narcissistic lioness—offering. As it is, there isn’t a way to navigate deftly. To allude to something physiological will make her daughter (who doesn’t particularly enjoy her parents’ live presence but also doesn’t want them dead) suspicious and to tell the truth—that she’d been steeling herself for an encounter with her husband following an encounter with the woman who’d almost ended their marriage—is obviously out of the question.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“But you have to at least pretend that you care about your—”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She thinks of Helen Russo beside her at the botanic garden, Helen Russo, whom she has always loved too: love that she'd never quite been able to define, love that wasn't specifically anything, tamilial or sexual or aspirational, parental or romantic or platonic, but also wasn't specifically not any of those things: love that was simply a point of fact, its own entity.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Your mom," she says to Melissa, searching for some good-natured entry into a less loaded conversation. "She seems— It's nice that she's as protective as she is of Sunny."
"That's one way to look at it," Melissa says, and she laughs, lusty and surprising, a laugh full of things Julia both does and doesn't recognize, private griefs and savage disappointments and lifetime scrutiny of inscrutable daughters.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“To any outside observer—to Melissa, prob-ably, hopefully-they'd seem affectionate and well oiled; Julia is the only one who can feel the remoteness in his touch, hear the hardness around the edge of his speech. She takes a swallow of wine, too cold; her temples pulse a few times as she feels it go down her throat.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She halfheartedly attended prenatal yoga classes before Ben was born, unaware at the time that the breathing exercises therein would aid her not during childbirth but instead, two decades later, in violence prevention against her teenage daughter.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She has, a few times since Brady's birthday, allowed herself to regret deleting Helen's number from her phone. There are few people on the earth to whom she could explain why she and Mark are in the place they are in right now, and Helen is one of them; she also allowed herself to wonder earlier-once she's opened the gates to this kind of thinking it's difficult to prevent other things from slipping through-what Helen would think of the menu she's come up with for dinner.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“… but her daughter looks nervous again, and it occurs to Julia that Alma is unused to seeing her like this—combative, a little unstable; she has become, she realizes, unused herself to being like this.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“he's supposed to know this; he of all people is supposed to know: that she isn't a bad person, just occasionally bad at being a person.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“It is also, she acknowledges, the thing she wished her own mother would have said to her, ever. I'm here if you need me. She wonders how much of a difference something like that makes, the mere awareness that there are people nearby thinking about you, not hoping you'll break down but ready to help if you do.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Alma had felt her infant discontent deeply, and expressed it with gusto—at least a more complex sadness, because sadness got more confusing as you got older, accreted and layered and camouflaged itself until the source was buried beyond discovery.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“How did you know where I live?"
"You told me," he said. "Superior Street, blue door"
Had she told him that? Why had she told him that? Had they ever exchanged anything beyond self-conscious recitations of pop culture references and saliva? Perhaps she'd dredged it up during some dull fact-finding search; she was constantly, despite how little time they actually spent talking, running out of things to say to him, pulling banalities from a boring interior satchel.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“There were times when she'd find herself, among the obsessive ticker-tape thoughts that unspooled regardlesslying awake next to Mark, one ear tuned to Ben—just thinking about Helen, in the way that she used to think about her husband when she first met him, obsessive cataloging of recent visits and imaginative anticipation of future ones. It felt like a sickness, until it turned into something else and then violently exploded, but seeing Helen at the grocery had reminded her of the fact that she's always felt her most important internalizations fear, or jealousy, or love-like a fist around her gut.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“but then suddenly she wasn't thinking about those things, and it felt good to not think about those things. She might be morally bankrupt and borderline insane, but for a few moments, when she was with him, it felt like none of it mattered. And the less you looked at yourself, she found, the harder it became to start doing it again. For the first time, she unzipped her own jeans, and then she started in on his.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was