Lucky Us Quotes

“some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn’t get over a bee sting.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“You want the guy who’ll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It’s not about talking the talk,”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“moving forward only because backward wasn’t possible.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“These were my people: the abandoned, the unloved, the phenomenally unlucky.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn’t, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn’t love them.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Don’t you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it’s the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who’ll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It’s not about talking the talk, Eva. You must have met my father, I said.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he'd point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said—women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“People,” he said. “They can’t be underestimated.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“She didn’t believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can’t make friends with grief, you’ve got to at least make way for it.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“The wicked people of the world are not supposed to be calm and composed. They are supposed to have hysterics and take poison like Hitler and Göring, or fall on their swords like the Japanese soldiers when they had to surrender. They are not supposed to cross one leg over the other and show off their white stockings and nice ankles.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it’s more horseshit.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“she didn’t understand a thing about Catholics. It’s all praise Mary, she said, women doing all the hard work and letting men run the church and calling the shots for everyone.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Yeah, he said, you'll know he's the one because when he says he'll do anything for you, he means it. Don't you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it's the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who'll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It's not about talking the talk, Eva.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“I wish I’d thrown my arms around Gus’s neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“(My vision of the future was like the paintings I’d seen of the Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.)”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn’t make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Your father says you're the smart one."
"Not the pretty one," I said. I was mortified.
"Oh, you can fake pretty," she said.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“So, now I know that not only will the German people stand for it, so will the Americans. It turns out we'll stand for any goddamn thing the government will do on our behalf, and if that includes a boot in the kidneys or taking everything a man has and throwing it on his front lawn for the neighbors to pick through, we're okay with that. We're better than they are, I hear, because we're not exterminating a whole people. Future generations will admire our restraint.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“my mother must have said to me a hundred times that men needed to be handled right and a woman who couldn’t handle her man had only herself to blame.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“AB: It’s a great gift. It was the training: to listen, to observe. Those skills are very much what you need as a writer. Keep your mouth shut and see what’s happening around you. Don’t finish people’s sentences for them. Don’t just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they’re saying it. That was great training for writing.”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us

“Two starving Jews, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Ellenbogen, are sitting on a park bench, sharing their last piece of bread. They look across the park and a priest’s putting up a big sign in front of his church: CONVERT NOW AND WE’LL GIVE YOU $1,000! “Oh, boy,” says Cohen. “I’ll do it!” An hour later, he comes out, looking happy. Ellenbogen says to him, “Did they give you the money?” Cohen spits in his direction. “Is that all you people ever think about?”
― Amy Bloom, Lucky Us