The Condition Quotes

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“It was the oldest friends who mattered most. With each passing year, Paulette realized this more deeply. She thought of her borther Roy, retired to Arizona, to golf with other men who were also - she loathed the expression - senior citizens. Roy had arrived in Phoenix with an entire life behind him, a career, a marriage; to his new friends he'd always be old.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“….. The air smelled of sweet ocean, a special thing. As a little girl she’d identified a half dozen ways the sea could smell, briny or fishy or sandy or green. A few times each summer, for reasons she couldn’t explain, the breeze smelled of molasses, dark and sweet. ….”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“For years, struggling to raise the daughter she’d expected to have, she had failed to see the one she’d gotten.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Like all young people, she’d once harbored the unconscious conviction that the world had begun the day she was born. Time had disabused her of this notion. It was, she supposed, the fundamental difference between youth and age. She”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s renaissance, the city’s transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life. Or”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“She took offense. Suddenly Gil Pyle’s past seemed crowded with women, the ex-wives and girlfriends he mentioned casually, frequently, as though Paulette were an army pal or a drinking buddy. Wrinkled, sexless, all but irrelevant. A former woman, neutered by age.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition

“Severe cases of Turner’s, where a girl’s second X chromosome was missing entirely, were easy to identify. Small stature plus certain telltale physical features—low-set ears, a low hairline, folds of excess skin at the sides of the neck—could have no other cause.”
― Jennifer Haigh, The Condition