The Engagements Quotes

“She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“The outside pressure to be married was intense. This had surprised her a decade ago, but now she thought she understood. People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“You want your kids to do better than you did," he said. "That's what the American Dream is all about. But it's hard when they outgrow you. It hurts like hell.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet music, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“Her mother… told Kate that after women got out of lousy marriages, they generally had the good sense to stay away from the institution altogether. While men just kept trying to get it right because they were incapable of being alone.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“She had always considered her inability to make a scene one of her worst qualities.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from—their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable. Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent half their lives just trying to hold it together.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer.
The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter's food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn't seem to be going away despite so much talk. Rape at the elite American colleges, which wasn't going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from-their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. .. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“Through centuries and across cultures, women were intimidated and coerced into marriage through horrible means-kidnapping, physical violence, even gang rape. In eighteenth -century England, the doctrine of coverture dictated that a woman had no legal rights within a marriage, other than those afforded her by her husband. Early American laws replicated this idea, and did not change until the 1960's. Before then, most states had "head and master" laws, giving husbands the right to beat their wives and take full control of family decision making and finances, including the woman's own property.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“You should call your brother and congratulate him on the new job, her father might say over the phone, and it would take Kate a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Brother? She didn't have a brother.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“After all this time, she still had not grown accustomed to the American obsession with air-conditioning. Every store and subway car had it-an ecological disaster, but an apparent necessity for American comfort.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“This was the hardest part about a marriage, or a relationship like theirs: your hopes and your fears and your happiness hinged on someone else. When you stopped thinking that they ought to, you ended up like her parents, bitter and angry and apart.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“But when you envision the perfect flowers and the perfect food and the perfect outdoor space and the perfect weather, you forget that you can't rent the perfect family to go along with it. You're stuck with shitty old one you've already got.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“She and Gerald rarely argued, and when they did, she quickly nipped it in the bud, silently reciting an Ogden Nash poem entitled "A Word to Husbands," though she thought it applied to just as well to wives:

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“No one can ever know the inner parts of anyone else’s marriage. It’s a strange business.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“awake. James would force himself to close his eyes. For the next few hours, he’d lie there, thrashing around, trying to get comfortable. By morning,”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements

“Men made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day.”
― J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements