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

“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

“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

“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

“watching both their children leave the nest”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She sinks into brief contentment”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“And perhaps it is true”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“When people say they love kids. It just seems so sweeping to me, and arbitrary. Like saying you love adults. Who loves all adults? I hate most adults.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“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

“She’d been in such a hurry, but she can no longer entirely remember why. Had she known then what she does now—that it would all come to matter so little; and also that she wasn’t as weird as she’d thought, that there had surely been potential there for friendship, for community, for something other than utilitarian loneliness—she may have lingered longer, enjoyed her schooling instead of simply trying to get through it unnoticed.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“She’d remained on the periphery of her collegiate life because it seemed less risky, because you couldn’t lose what you didn’t have in the first place.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“He looked so much like a boy sometimes; his face had a way of softening when he was nervous or tired, and he was so frequently either or both of those things around her.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“an interminable back-and-forth of I love you. Alma never wanted to be the last one to say it, always wanted to be the last one to say it; she was afraid, she admitted once, of death, of one of them dying in their sleep and she just wanted to be sure that whoever it was knew.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“It seemed to her they were both missing something that most people had. Different somethings but nevertheless; neither of them ever walked outside feeling completely prepared to be one with the world.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Julia wondered how some people orchestrated their lives to be like that, primed and ready at all times to be walked in on, pots enticingly a-simmer and alluring projects under way, as if they’d never been started and would never end and instead just exist, in perpetuity, in a picturesque in-between.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Every day her head spouted out a frenetic ticker tape like cable news ranging from the quotidian—call plumber re: powder room sink, almost out of peanut butter—to the philosophical—Ben’s new dentist looks like Gorbachev, do other people spend as much time as I do feeling sad about fat animals—and at night she couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Children confounded her, their baffling mix of acuity and guilelessness.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was