Preparation for the Next Life Quotes

“There was nothing he could say that was equal to the curve of her hip.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“If you’re getting married, it better be a real marriage or you’ll be in big trouble. That I’ll tell you for free. Free advice. She didn’t understand what he meant. What do you mean? Maybe we’re ordinary people, but the feeling between us is real.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Waiting didn’t make any sense, he said. If there was something you wanted to do, you better do it today, because you didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“If you put your head up, the Taiwanese bosses would make sure your head got pushed back down again. He did not have to pay you. You were an illegal immigrant in your own country, you found out. That’s how big China was.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Maybe we're ordinary people, but the feeling between us is real.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“She could not believe her fortune. How life surprised her.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Her love, something he was so unused to, seemed to hasten the emotional outpouring.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“But most of them couldn’t remember what she was. They did not see that she ran when others walked, that she got there early and left late, that she pretended she”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“And he looked around at the night and it felt as if the war, and the freedom it might have represented, was just outside the boundary of what he could see, as if it were in a suburb of the city.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Money, keys to a room, a legal arrangement of uncertain efficacy: a significant but short list. She didn’t know whether it was more right to refuse or to accept this everything that he was so ready to part with.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“her leg. Above all, she wanted to do something she could control. She wanted to reject every solution that involved going through a government office. It wasn’t realistic, but she wished she could reduce everything to the simple physical test of running away.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“I love you, he said. She did not respond and he wondered if the words sounded as empty to her as they had to him. He stroked her back and hip. There was nothing he could say that was equal to the curve of her hip.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“The sweet sharp pain that foreshadows weeping visited him again in the throat and eyes.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“She began to watch for the signs of his mood changing. She began to expect her happiness to be taken away from her. The worse life got, the more she needed her happiness with him.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“When they fought, she was nearly incapacitated by sadness, but that was inside. On the outside, her limbs still moved: she pressed on, she went to work.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“The bright side, she said, was that she had met him and they could form an army of their own, a two-person unit, to fight these difficult battles involving his mental recovery and her immigration status.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Something bad had happened to her not long ago, she said. I believe my life is over, but somethings save me. Did he know? It is the end, I think. Instead it is the beginning. You must keep on to your hope, for both of us, she told him, because maybe some good thing will happen.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“She was what he had ached for when he had been over there. When he had believed he was going to die, the idea of never having a woman to love him had summed up all his pain.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“HIS EPISODES OF WEEPING had not started yet, but they would. Her love, something he was so unused to, seemed to hasten the emotional outpouring.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“He would have signed up even if the recruiters hadn’t come right to his high school. 9/11 was the big reason, but he would have gone anyway, just to do something.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“If you keep going to that way, west, west, west, you will be the ocean, then China. No one will understand you. Everyone will be confusing. Maybe it’s different for you.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“In it, she beheld what was possible. The city was uncontained. It covered a massive area and graded out into the world.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“This was the news that Skinner received before he went to New York alone, holding to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Why not? Is there something wrong with me? That’s something for you to ask yourself. That’s not my issue.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Now he was cutting through monumental project towers, his silhouette distorted by what he was carrying, a burdened figure moving steadily across the great barren landscape of giant shadows and building structures and cold lights filtering down.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Melons, peaches, apples, almonds, dates, Uighurs waiting in the shade, waiting for jobs, waiting for a drink of water, minarets above the rooftops.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“The women are as beautiful as sun and moon, as the saying goes—cheeks red like apples and a brow fair like milk. Arm in arm, sister and cousin, they go picking flowers, while the men gaze after them with longing, hearing them laughing like nightingales.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“There was an aching in her eyes from loneliness. When she closed them, tears scattered down her face.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Then tell me how to say heaven is high. She smiled and pointed at the stained ceiling. Heaven is high and the earth is wide.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“The light strengthened gradually and silently, changing from gray to rose to gold.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life