Show Them a Good Time Quotes

“She read novels and underlined passages that felt special to her in big streaks of red pen. These novels were about civilised women who holidayed in Europe, women whose lives weren't rotten or shameful. Someday, she thought, someday. She would burn her face off to become one of these women.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“On the Metro she thought about how easy it would be to step off somewhere else, disappear. It occurred to her that, for the whole of her life, she might never stop having that thought.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“He told me he felt like a character being awkwardly written out of a sitcom. 'You know when they are there but they don't do or say anything? Like nobody has a clue what to do with them? Then they disappear and not a single person even bothers to mention it. That is happening to me, I think.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“I had a personality that was best suited to short interactions.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“I was scared."

"Scared of death? That's natural."

"No . . . scared of everything else.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Afterwards, she felt stupid, like she had revealed more than she intended.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“There were things happening out there in the world – history, events. But history was not happening in my town, not to me.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“a feeling of forever melancholy . . .”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Angela cursed her gin and tonic. It was impossible to look wise, and to project an air of disinterest in various earthly disasters, while using a straw.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“He worried about my non-linear mind.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“They had seen boredom, stared it straight down, and survived.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“They had refined the habits of the long-married - saying nothing and then saying everything twice. They disregarded me, but in a practical way: the way you might ignore the weakling in a bomb shelter.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“It's terrible when you get old enough to dislike your old friends.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“No matter how many times Angela thought That's not happening again, it happened. It happened and it happened. It was all over quickly, but it happened.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“He was in the early stages of grief for someone he had never known.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Where all her other friends had disappeared to was a mystery she had no interest in solving.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“But I don't like this. I don't like superficial connections with people.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“I hadn't moved on. I don't know how anybody moves on from anything.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Here was my great, insurmountable problem, the culmination of all the lists – not everybody was going to love me. I didn't need everybody. I needed one person.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“I prepared what I would say. I would say, 'Hello, I'm a woman who needs help,' although I had worked hard my whole life to appear as if I never needed any help.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Despite everything we had done to each other, we remained close.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“I couldn't hold down furniture and I couldn't hold down people. It all just peeled away from me.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“The problem was people asked boring questions and when they asked boring questions, I gave boring answers. But if someone had asked, even once, the right question, I would have told the truth.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Over us, like a threat, hung a painted, shimmering sky.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“Stuff tied them to the world in a way I had no inclination for. I guess because I never expected to be here too long.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“My main trouble, my sister declared, was that I always lived my life like I was immediately planning on leaving it.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“My phone was more real to me than the people I encountered.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“It was fun, he explained, it was good, but to be the best you had to keep practicing and what was the point?”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“She should try to be gentler, less agitated, learn to make small talk in another language, or even her own language. Become someone a boy might want to touch. It seemed as if her whole life, from the age of thirteen onwards, had been geared towards that rotten desire and now the world had come up with a genius way of punishing her.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

“She continued doing the scrambling necessary to staying alive; working two jobs in the city, her personality dissolving into small talk. The cost of travel, the cost of lunch, the cost of being young.”
― Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time