Scaffolding Quotes

“All because one day she was in the right café. I used to think of that when I went to cafés. That maybe it would be the right day to be in the right café. Not that I was pretty enough to be a model or a movie star. But I thought maybe something would happen if I made myself available to it. So I went out as much as possible, putting myself in public, putting myself out where I could be found.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“In fidelity there are never two of you alone together.

And we sit at tables, and we lie in beds, and we dream our futures, and all the while, there are threads of other dreams woven in, a beach you visited with someone else, the name which you'd like for a girl but it happens to be the name of a girl from school she detested, the part of town you'd like to move to where years ago you kissed another girl at a party, you make all your plans and build all your projects but how many of them are yours, and how many of them are fragments of someone else's life?”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“Stasis, she says. You are enjoying the fixation of your desire. You’re afraid to get it moving again.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“You’re telling me what you think you should say, she says, why don’t we start talking about what you don’t think you should say?”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“I can’t pin her down, she is simply, and thoroughly, herself.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“I've been living out a mad love, seizing the Other and incorporating him into myself. But the only livable love has to maintain a certain distance. It seems more radical to accept your lover's alterity, and with that, their essential freedom and autonomy.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“Everything in the culture tries to convince us that if we are truly in love with the right person, we will be as one with them. It isn't true. We are always each other's others.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“The day I met Clementine was the day after she moved in.

I drew closer, and fastened a kiss on his cheek, like closing the latch on a door.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“Separation is one of the two things we fear most. The other thing is coming together.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding

“it’s less about your coming up with a narrative that explains and cures your symptoms and more about what might be suggested during the therapeutic process, how the way we talk about our lives encodes the way we think about them, the things we want, our desires, how we might learn to live with them instead of being led by them. You’ll never be cured, so to speak. There’s no cure for being human.”
― Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding