The Sequel Quotes

“Thinking about publishing something before you’d written it was like the classic Aesop fable of the milkmaid who imagines spending all the money she’ll earn from selling her milk, even as she carries that milk to market, the distraction of which causes her to trip and spill it, thereby ending all of her visions of acclaim, praise, and self-worth. Such people, Anna thought, did not deserve to cry over their spilt milk, but they cried anyway. They cried a lot. Through Jake she had met so many unpublished writers, and they were bitter people, but the irony was that they remained bitter even if they did manage to publish. Now they were just bitter about other things: reviews and marketing attention from their publishers, invitations to festivals, places at colonies like the one she’d visited a year and a half earlier, all of the magic fairy dust that a few books and authors received, and most books and authors did not.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“A Little Life”).”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“I’m so excited," Anna said. She didn’t mean it exactly, but she’d noticed how people tended to say they were excited when they meant a broad range of things. "Thanks for inviting me" or "How are you today" or "I am encountering this product or service for the very first time". She hadn’t meant any of those things either.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“The agents were itching to get her out and let the painters in, so she finished the last of her triage and let Jake’s parents know that she was taking a vacation while the apartment was being shown. She told Wendy and Matilda that she was heading back to Seattle to see friends, and then to a private place she knew on Vashon Island, to work on an idea for a new book. As expected, this excited them so much that neither mentioned the other thing on all of their minds. She turned off her phone, and “forgot” it in the drawer of her bedside table.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“In the end, and at the last possible moment, she asked him only one question. It was the only question she truly did want an answer to. Leaning over his pillow, her mouth very close to his once handsome face, she asked it: “Just for the record, and just because we’re here, was it all your idea? Or something the two of you cooked up together? And also, I’ve always wondered. Did you watch?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“Oh, I wish it were that easy. There are some things you just have to try. Try and fail. Try and fail better.” It was a good line. She hadn’t written it, but she doubted there were many Beckett fans in Randy Johnson’s listening audience.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“I really haven’t discussed it. Certainly never”—she nodded at Rene’s iPhone—“for posterity. But I think one of the things people who commit suicide take with them is the possibility of resolution for their loved ones. We can howl into the wind for the rest of our lives, and there’s never going to be anyone there to answer us. But maybe that’s where the impulse to make fiction can come from. Where there’s a void of information, we can always form a narrative and make that the information, the truth. Or at least … our truth. Does that make sense?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“No one ever actually confronts that person who fails to do that thing they were almost certainly never going to get done. No one actually ever says: So, what happened to that plan of yours?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“There are carrots and there are sticks, and then there is the outright offer of publication to an unpublished writer.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“It was no wonder their parents considered Ethan their favorite.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

“Thanks for coming by, Anna Williams-Bonner, the author of the fiction novel Other Words.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel