Alternate Side Quotes

“People go through life thinking they are making decisions, when they're really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“When one of you wanted one life, and the other wanted something completely different, there was a technical term for that: irreconcilable.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“The slightly aberrational spouse was a status symbol, too. The husband who cooked. The wife who played golf. The husband who took his children to school. The wife who ran her own business. Of course, it was chancier with the women than with the men. You couldn't push it too far. The marathoner wife who made partner - perhaps. The wife who could benchpress her own weight and made the cover of Fortune - too emasculating. The men, on the other hand, got unlimited mileage out of performing so-called women's tasks as long as they also had substantial disposable income and significant business cards.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Nora had discovered that by herself was a condition she really liked”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn't recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“But once there were children, you couldn’t zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, serviceable but without its sheen.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“You could argue they'd lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage. But the truth was, there wasn't any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn't try at all. ”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Wasn't this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“They rarely quarreled anymore. Their marriage had become like the AA prayer : “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . “Or at least to move into a zone in which I so don’t care anymore and scarcely notice. Nora had thought that this was their problem alone until she realized that it was what had happened to almost everyone she knew who was still married, even some of those who were on their second husbands.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“feel inferior without your consent.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Charlie pulled their car out of the indoor garage, and the two of them drove together to the vet, Homer's panting loud in the back seat. As she ran her fingers through his pied coat while he stood shivering on the stainless-steel examining table, Nora realized there was no flesh between fur and bone. She kept telling herself that she was assuming the worst, but when the vet came in after the exams, the scans, she knew the news was terrible. She and Charlie held each other and cried, for Homer and for all the rest of it, as the vet gently pushed the plunger on the syringe and the dog's heart ceased to beat beneath their joined hands.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“I sit on the sidewalk with a sign. Maybe you think its humiliating, but it's only humiliating if I feel humiliated, and I don't. What did Eleanor Roosevelt say? 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“The truth was that their marriages were like balloons: some went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no life to it anymore.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“It was notable because they rarely quarreled anymore. Their marriage had become like the AA prayer: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“When people divorced, she was often surprised, and when they stayed together, sometimes more so. She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn't try at all. In the beginning they all spend so much time trying to know the other person, asking questions, telling stories, wanting to burrow beneath the skin. But then you married and naturally were supposed to know one another down to the ground, and so stopped asking, answering, listening.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“societies that eschew material possessions are happier overall.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Shavuot?”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Their children, their dogs, and housing prices: the holy trinity of conversation for New Yorkers of a certain sort. For the men, there were also golf courses and wine lists to be discussed; for the women, dermatologists.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“There were three types of people in New York: people like Nora, who had found their home there; people who talked about how much they hated it and would always live and eventually die there; and people who always had one foot over the border, to Scarsdale or Roslyn or Boca Raton.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“The city exerted its customary fiscal hold on its residents and turned Christmas into a bonus round, with envelopes for the postman, the super, the housekeeper, the doorman.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

“Nora's walk to work was a kind of labor of love, too, of that love for the city that occasionally wavered or dimmed but had never gone away. She tended to see always the same people, the Sikh bicyclist with his two small children in a seat on the back, the man who ran while nonchalantly juggling three fluorescent green tennis balls. It was as though they all knew one another without knowing anything about one another, so that if for a week or two Tennis Ball Man did not appear Nora would find herself wondering if he was on vacation, or had moved to another neighborhood, or something worse, a broken hip , a heart attack.”
― Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side