Astonish Me Quotes

“How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn't dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward moth.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate’s urge to cling, to close one’s arms around a warm, soft object.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“He didn’t love you, darling. What could be more necessary to forgive?”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Sometimes I wonder,” Joan said, her mouth red from the punch, “how you’re supposed to know if you’re really feeling what you think you’re feeling. Like how do we know everybody sees colors the same way, you know? Do we all feel ‘happy’ the same way?”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“He finds low-level jealousy to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Her throat is tight with fear. She is afraid of how this man, this stranger, has already changed the sensation of being alive. She is afraid he will slip away.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“What do I do?’ she had asked Harry. ‘What do I do now? Everything is ruined. You’ve ruined everything.’ ‘That you think that,” he’d said, “is exactly the problem.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob’s projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“He and Ludmilla had been a couple when they were both in the Kirov, and now they are getting married.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Joan laughs and asks for more, but the mockery stings. Arslan had been her lover. She had been the one to help him defect.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“Joan has never danced as well as tonight. She is of the corps but also entirely herself, both part and whole. The tiny ball of cells clinging to her uterine wall is a secret, but she feels as translucent and luminous as a firefly.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“The old chestnut is true: Jacob has always liked babies, but the love he feels for his own is an epiphany, shocking in its irreversibility.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me

“She seems distracted, the way Joan feels when Harry is away on a school trip and part of her tries to follow him clairvoyantly through his day, probing the ether for any sign of distress.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Astonish Me