The Doorman Quotes

“Julian's daughter was gluten-free voluntarily and vegan insufferably.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman

“After a certain age, nothing ever gets better, not really. It’s just different speeds of getting worse and, ultimately, futile. No one gets out alive.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“I hate social selfies in front of artwork,” he said instead. “They make me apoplectic. Sometimes I think my hatred is wildly out of proportion. But at other times I’m certain that these posts signify an inversion of the very idea of art”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“If what you want is anonymity, nothing succeeds like aging.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman

“Julian asked himself: what do I still want to do before I die? This was another thing that depressed him: he didn’t really have any answer.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“The opposite of the expected thing wasn’t clever. It was just as predictable”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“You have no idea”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Maybe not purposefully”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“and strawberry-mint mojitos,”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“This affair was maybe the best experience of his life. But it was also the worst. If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t love.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“These apartments were more like vaults than residences. One sold for two hundred and twenty million dollars, a figure equivalent to spending nearly a thousand dollars per day, every day, for six hundred years. A scale that proved just how much was wrong with the world.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“The woman walked away without saying thanks, or sorry to bother you, anything. Now that Julian was no longer famous, she was no longer polite.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“But the actual famous people were almost never recognized, because they were much older than their images in the public memory. The Tony-winning actor shuffled his beagle to the park in peace; no one tried to peer behind the disco icon’s sunglasses. If what you want is anonymity, nothing succeeds like aging.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Despite any friendly flirty women he might run into in Central Park—and, much more so, despite Emily Longworth—Julian felt himself becoming irrelevant. Irrelevant to his wife, who barely noticed him, a relationship that consisted largely of coordinating logistics, as if they were cordial colleagues whose fortunes were tied together on the success or failure of executing clearly demarcated responsibilities on the Sonnenberg account. Irrelevant to his kids, Asher off to college next year, Oona the following, both of them barely giving their dad the time of day.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“These bodies are temperamental machines, prone to constant breakdown, requiring outrageous levels of maintenance and repair, the doctors and dentists, the exercise, all the damn food—a constant supply of fuel in one end and waste out the other, every few hours for a lifetime, a full third of which is spent powered down. These machines were designed to operate for twenty or at most thirty years, but modern medicine has extended that to eighty, ninety years, a hundred. Like driving a car two million miles, three, four. What do you expect?”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Emily did not lose control of her emotions. Or if she did, she did not let it show, and though that may not be the same exact thing, it’s awfully close.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Chicky hopes that Canarius won’t turn out to be a guy who uses his origin story as an excuse to be an asshole. But you never know. Evolution isn’t always the same as improvement.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“For a certain type of New Yorker, The New York Times was god.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Sometimes you know you’re making a mistake even as you’re doing it. Sometimes you don’t have any real choice.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Everyone in the room was squinting at what was maybe a quadruple-negative divvied up between two speakers.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“If there was one band that sounded like a white-guy bar, it was Boston.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“So it was that in the middle of middle age, Julian found himself greeting each dawn with pessimism, and each evening reaping the dubious reward of having proved himself correct. Each day he felt less and less valued, more and more irrelevant, a progression that looked inexorable.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Morgan had the unquestioned reverence for the Ivy League that’s peculiar to those who’d gone elsewhere.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“All the best things in life come with a lot that isn’t. Maybe that’s what makes them the best.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman

“You have no idea, when you’re young, what it’s going to be like when you’re not.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“All the best things in life come with a lot that isn’t.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“That’s how Whit had gotten obscenely rich: by exploiting somebody else’s invention, using connections from an expensive education financed by inherited wealth, to redirect taxpayer dollars from the working class into his own bank account. Whit had talked himself into being proud of this.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Is evil transitive? That was one of the questions that kept Emily awake at night.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel

“Longworth.”
― Chris Pavone, The Doorman: A Novel