Nice to Come Home To Quotes

“She was getting over it. She could feel it. Maybe she would never entirely be over him, but she thought she was beginning to see that a fairly normal future could be hers again.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“More in-betweens: late afternoon, early spring, adolescence, falling in love. She hated the in-betweens. Always, she just wanted to get where she was going – to be there already, She was almost paralyzed by the in-betweenness. She didn’t know how she was supposed to behave.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“You know how you’re at a party and you pick up the wrong beer, and you know after one sip that it’s not yours? But then, when you find the right one, you know it right away? Why? What is it? The temperature, or the taste of your own spit that you somehow recognize? Or the weight and moistness of the can? Or maybe everything, all together. But it’s all so subtle and complex you can’t explain it. If someone asked, How do you know that’s your beer? well, you wouldn’t know what to say. You just know.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“Listen,” he said, raising himself up on one elbow. “You don’t just decide one day you’re going to run a marathon, right? You have to do some training first.”

“Aren’t you being glib about this?”

His hands slid around her, inside her sweater, touching her naked back.

Everything in her wanted to melt. Oh, just let it go, she told herself. “Am I the marathon?”

He smiled and nodded. “The New York Marathon.”

“The Boston is harder," she muttered.

“Okay, you’re the Boston, then.”

“And what was she? Just a little warm-up?”

“She was like a 5K,” he said, so near her ear that she got goose bumps. “Well…maybe a 10K.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“Dear, he was the bad dress of men - a bit too short and clinging to you in all the wrong places.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“Do you remember that scene in Airplane! where the guy with the flags is waving a jet into its gate, then someone asks him where the bathrooms are, so he begins gesturing in the other direction?"

"So the jet crashes into the airport. Yes."

"That's how it is, with him. I think I'm getting these signals, you know, and it turns out he's just looking for the toilet.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“Pru curled up in the bay window and looked out at the city. People were going to the movies, parents were putting their children to bed. Suddenly, she feared for them all. She remembered, as she did from time to time, that everyone was going to die. Plane crashes, heart attacks, the slow erosion of bones. How did we manage to forget this, she wondered, and get through our daily lives? It was astonishing to her. Everybody was going to die, but still they did the laundry, watered the plants, dug out the scum around the taps in the bathroom,. They let themselves love others, who were also going to die. They created little beings, who they also loved, and who will, one day, cease to exist. What did it matter how love ended? So it ended for Patsy with Jacob returning to his wife, instead of with his death. Did it really matter so much? She thought of something her mother used to say, a warning she gave whenever they’d begun to fight over some precious object or another: “It’s going to end in tears girls! It always ends in tears.”

For a long time, she’d thought the whole problem was about finding love. She’d thought that, once she’d found it, she’d basically be done. Set. Good to go. Funny how until just now, she hadn’t put it all together: All love ended, somehow. One way, or another.

It was all going to end in tears, wasn’t it?”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“So being single and childless had its merits. For dang sure.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“And the rules! How Pru loved rules! It wasn't so much that she like following rules, but knowing what they were gave her a sense of order, and peace. She felt safer knowing that if she broke one, there would be repercussions.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“She was old to know that marriages were like children. They had lives of their own and didn't necessarily act the way you thought they should. And that the rules were different for each one.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To

“Married people, thought Pru, never pictured single people as they really were, eating dinner from a tin with the cat on the table.”
― Rebecca Flowers, Nice to Come Home To