Evvie Drake Starts Over Quotes

“And if you’ve been somebody’s first call, it’s hard not to be their first call anymore. She says it’s one of the reasons why parents sometimes feel sad when their kids are getting married. It’s not just the empty nest. They’re not the first call anymore. I’m not Andy’s first call anymore. It doesn’t mean I want to be his girlfriend, and it doesn’t mean I don’t like her. But it was sad. It’s different. The doctor says it’s important to be sad.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Your head is the house you live in, so you have to do the maintenance.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“therapy is like a toothbrush. You can’t really put it to use for anybody except yourself.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“The tag on her chamomile teabag said, There is no trouble that a good cup of tea can’t solve. It sounded like what a gentleman on Downton Abbey would say right before his wife got an impacted tooth and elegantly perished in bed.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“My therapist calls it grieving the first call.” “What does that mean?” “She says when something happens, good or bad, you can only call one person first. And if you’ve been somebody’s first call, it’s hard not to be their first call anymore. She says it’s one of the reasons why parents sometimes feel sad when their kids are getting married. It’s not just the empty nest. They’re not the first call anymore.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Dr. Talco tapped her index fingers together. “Did you know it’s possible to remove your own teeth with pliers?” Evvie looked at her blankly. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.” “No, no, probably not. But it’s true. If you have a bad tooth, you can take a pair of pliers, stick them in there, and pull as hard as you can. Is that something you would do?” “This feels like a trick question.” “Stay with it.” “No, I don’t think I would pull out my own tooth with pliers.” “That’s what I always tell people about therapy. It’s not a question of whether you could try to do it by yourself. You can always try it. But it can be dangerous, and it’s harder. Trying to buck yourself up is the tooth pliers of mental health.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Did you want to do something else? he asked.
She sighed. "I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You're twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It's like a pool where you can't touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was accidentally in the middle of it the whole time.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“To some of the people who had watched him grow up, I think he was…a unicorn.” “He didn’t want bigger things?” “No, he did.” “Then why come back?” Evvie shrugged. “Because anywhere else, he’d just be a nice-looking horse.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“There is no trouble that a good cup of tea can’t solve.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Instead, for luck, he asked them for 26, because Evvie’s address was 26 Bancroft Street. When he got home and he showed the shirt to Evvie, she said, “Hey, look. That’s my house number. Maybe it’s lucky.” He’d folded it up, saying, “Maybe.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Eveleth had always hated how blushing felt. It was accompanied by such a miserable desire to cease to be, utterly, to turn into a fog that could be waved away.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“That therapy is like a toothbrush. You can’t really put it to use for anybody except yourself.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“There’s this kid Mike Parco, who at the time is eight years old and is a serious, total asshole. I know you’re not supposed to say that about children, but I swear, it takes most men at least two divorces to be as mean as this twerp.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“It’s not a question of whether you could try to do it by yourself. You can always try it. But it can be dangerous, and it’s harder. Trying to buck yourself up is the tooth pliers of mental health.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“In the car, Evvie cranked an Avett Brothers record she hadn’t listened to in almost two years. Technically, the song was about dying, but it sounded like hope: When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts; the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house; with no hard feelings…”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You're twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It's like a pool where you can't touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was actually in the middle of it the whole time.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“...you wake up one day and you need a whole new plan.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Dean, people don't like...fragility. It makes them nervous. They're scared thinking things just happen. They think there's always something you can do to keep monsters from getting under the bed.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“She sent him a yellow heart. All the hearts were different to her, shaded and pleasantly oblique and sent in a language only she spoke - which maybe meant it wasn't a language, just a diary hiding in plain sight. The yellow heart was for gratitude.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“The part of the future that was in focus had shortened; the part that was just a wall of fog went on forever. He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t. The sixteenth second was a killer.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Everything she said, he treated like it ended in a semicolon.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Evvie’s Scandinavian grandmother had claimed that young women dream about the husbands they want, old women dream about the husbands they wanted, and only the luckiest women, for a moment in the middle, dream about the husbands they’ve got.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t. The sixteenth second was a killer.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“guys on the Internet who spell ‘loser’ with two O’s.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“hadn’t yet turned to “anti-aging,” but she figured “revitalizing” was for over thirty and under forty, “anti-aging” was for over forty and under seventy, and then when you were seventy, you just told everybody to fuck off.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“You would be shocked how many people tell me that they got through cancer, or divorce, or having their house burn down. But then they lost their keys or they ran out of coffee or the dog chewed on their slipper and they fell to pieces. It’s just that last insult.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Therapy is like a toothbrush. You can’t really put it to use for anybody but yourself.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over