Early Work Quotes

“I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight case against them in principle.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“I don't care about my life.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“It had occurred to me lately that it was much more possible than I'd previously considered to be both 'self-aware' and fundamentally wrong about the nature of the self.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I don't even like most people.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“My goals at these things usually extended no further than making at least one moderately clever comment and trying not to spill anything on my shirt.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“New York, which I had complained about for so long, became a beacon, a place I missed terribly whenever I was away and then glutted myself on until I was sick when I came back. You move away from the city and suddenly everyone wants to have drinks. Nobody’ll hang out unless you leave.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“If it still wasn’t working when she went to bed, she could start something new in the morning.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“So I took a leave from school to “support Julia” and “write my book,” the second of which people took far too literally.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work: A Novel

“The night felt forced, off-kilter. We were trying to have fun, fixating on what was available to us, but it was a stretch.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“It was like, oh, we've found the still, dead center of things. This is the quiet middle place where nothing can be done.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I put the story aside and added it to the growing list of things I was inadequate at or incapable of doing.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She'd become an idea. She was an abstract thing I wanted, a thing that I already had, really, if I could keep it.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“Our lives aren't worth dying over.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention—like a Hardy novel where I'd exceeded my society's allowance for freethinking and was now being punished.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I was mad that I couldn't enjoy it, that I'd made it impossible for myself to have a nice vacation.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“Unfortunately I'm one of those people who writes better when they're unhappy.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“You are . . . depressed? Bored?"

"Are there other feelings?”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“So I did something that you're not supposed to do, one more addition to an expanding universe of said things.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“the dreamy endlessness of the afternoons spent deep in her own mind.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“Did you ever have the problem where you don't want to go where you're supposed to be, but you can't go where you want to be?”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“It's just really hard when you've got something, and you think something is going to happen next, and then it's taken away from you. It's one thing when you don't know what you're losing, but to have it, and understand how precious it is, and still lose it . . . It fucking sucks.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I just want her to be happy. But I don't think that's what she wants.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“I have a pretty clear memory of most of that night, but even while it was happening, it was like a dream, where you do things you don't want to do but can't control your own actions.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“But won't you miss me?" . . .

"I already do," he said.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“How can I make your difficult life more tolerable?"

"Just be nice to me, I guess? My brain doesn't work.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She'd been surprised by the pang that the idea of the place gave her. She didn't think of herself as a romantic about location, even though she was secretly romantic about everything.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“But, like lots of people she knew, she mostly wanted it so she wouldn't have to want it anymore, so that people would get off her back about how she didn't have any.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“She was nauseous with anticipation . . . even as she knew that, even on TV, these kinds of things never seemed to actually work out.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work

“My hope, as always, was that someone else would make the decision for me, absolve me of the little responsibility I had.”
― Andrew Martin, Early Work