The New Neighbor Quotes

“They say there's peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire's absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“people are much more interesting when they have a bit of a bite. We”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“I want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“Some people see their spouses as separate from them,' Megan says. 'And some people see their spouses as an extension of them, and that informs their attitude and behavior.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“Even if Megan imagines differently, she [Jennifer] is not the tragic figure. Tommy is. Tommy always was. Nobody saw the tragedy in being the practical one. He was the one who fell painfully short of his potential, the one who even as he let his business flounder and drank too much and showed up late, continued to be though of as a *really great guy.* And he was a really great guy. ... And other people say that, the way he looked at her and all those other things. And so she was the villain. She was the one who didn't laugh at his joke, or looked pained when he gave in to the call to stay for another. She was the one who wanted to leave the party; he was the one who kept it going. The one who wants to leave the party is never the favored one.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“I don't have to wonder where he he, what he's doing, or who. I don't have to worry about all the ways he'll scar my son. I don't have to watch myself give in again and again, audience to my own relentless weakness. I thought if he were gone I wouldn't hate myself so much, which isn't true, as it turns out, but still his absence is as close as I can get to freedom. There's a certain clearheadedness now, there's a kind of lonely clarity--”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“When you’re young you have to invent tasks to fill the time, while I can kill an hour just making myself some tea. She”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“We will all satisfy our curiosity when we can, which is any time we think no one will catch us.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“How often do I get to forget my body? My body is too much with me. “Late and soon,” as Wordsworth has it, though of course he’s complaining about the world. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” etc. Thanks to Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher, I still have that poem memorized. But Wordsworth and I do not agree on our difficulties. The world I can more or less get away from, as I think I’ve proven, and there’s so much of nature around me I’d be hard-pressed to long for more. Sometimes I wish the birds would shut the hell up. It’s not the world I can’t escape but my body. Not its demands so much at this stage, but its complaints and limitations. Its resistance and its pain.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“If he’d lived I might have married him and had a passel of brats and a dog. Who wants that happy ending?” “A lot of people.” “It’s bullshit.” “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they’d let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor