Cartwheel Quotes

“Learning to be an adult was learning that your best was rarely quite enough.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that way quite a bit earlier, and spent their lives waiting for their bodies to match their souls.”
― Jennifer Dubois, Cartwheel

“That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“She never had to learn to live in a world that didn't necessarily want to go easy on her.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.'
'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.'
So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Maybe this had been something like the colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, before words had ushered in vision - we do not see that which we have no language to understand.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims' families--but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won't be tainted by the aggressor's sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won't be touched by the victim's pain.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Everybody should have someone whose belief in them is unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“No?” This was a matter of some interest to Lily; when she and Harold had broken up, they had solemnly vowed to stay friends. And why wouldn’t they? They were both young and resilient and had had their hearts broken two or three times already. But soon he’d taken up with a new girl—an accounting major, please!—who’d forbidden him ever to speak to Lily again. This she found crushing; she had very much wanted to stay friends with him, partly because being friends with ex-lovers seemed sophisticated and mature and continental, and partly because it seemed humane, and partly because she harbored a catastrophic fear of losing touch with anyone. It reminded her of death, and she was too easily reminded of death already. Then again, she knew that she had a more acute sense of the passage of time in general—and the swiftness of life, in particular—because of her dead sister, or almost-sister, or whatever. So she’d learned to forgive people their shortsightedness, and be happy for them that they’d lived the kinds of lives that would allow it.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Do you ever feel that way, though?” “What way?” “Like you could go back to some time that’s passed? Like you catch yourself thinking, why don’t I go there anymore, and why don’t I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it’s because that life is gone? And that you can’t?”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“The way to assure morality on Earth was not to behave as though there was a God, even if there wasn’t—it was to behave as though there was no God, even if there was. We must act as though ours is all the judgment and forgiveness that is ever forthcoming, if we want any hope of getting anything right.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“The trick to not killing yourself was to convince yourself, every single day, that your departure from the world would have a devastating effect on absolutely everyone around you, despite consistent evidence to the contrary.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“But it was one thing to know that your privilege was unearned; it was another thing entirely to feel that your sadness was, too - to have to be so pitifully glad, so pitifully sorry, for the modest perks of a dull and diligent middle-class life (TV, and Target candles, and a trip to Six Flags every year).”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports).”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“the things that go wrong are rarely the things you’ve thought to worry about.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“That's an applicable life lesson, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“There wasn't a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our formers selves had ever done.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“A maioria dos réus que Eduardo via tinha tido a vida difícil desde o início, uma vida que teria exigido enorme esforço, sorte e bondade sobrenatural para deslanchar direito.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Não existe outra vida a não ser a que temos.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Recentemente, Lily tinha chegado a duas conclusões: a primeira, que um dia todos nós estaremos mortos; e a segunda, que ainda não estamos mortos.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“As coisas que dão errado raramente são aquelas que chegaram a nos causar preocupação.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“There is not a single day that rightfully belongs to our lives except for those that actually compose it. Lying”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“ask why. If she said she needed it, he would believe her. Everybody should have someone whose belief in them is unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“If anything, man’s compassionate justice was even more necessary in a secular universe. Because if not now, after all, then when? If not for this, after all, then for what?”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“But between the mornings and the evenings, something was going wrong. A feeling came pricking at Lily in the late afternoons, when the sun turned a certain sickening rubescent color, casting light that made all the buildings look like glowing cinders. In those hours, Lily felt that she was kidding herself—that some central fiction of her life was growing worn with overuse, and that one day it would tear through completely. She would fall into a shaky melancholy then, as though coming down with a strange late-in-the-day hangover, and would have to go somewhere bright and capitalist and unreal to try to cheer herself up.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don’t really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can’t believe the disregard could truly be mutual. But it’s a useful thing to learn, you know, if you can manage not to feel too sorry about it.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel