The Latecomer Quotes

“After the accident he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air…He wasn’t in despair, he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly tumbling at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity…He was there, but he was always in that other place, the tumbling place, the place he was used to now.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Rochelle went silent again. It was interesting, I thought. I resolved to be more like this, myself: not to speak until I was ready. Obviously, people waited for you.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“It was not precisely true that she made him wish to be a better man; it was more true that she made him wish he wished to be a better man.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“always on the edge of some beautiful redemption.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Brooklyn Heights, where a frankly socialist ethos stood in bald contrast to soaring tuition”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“After that phone call, though, it was a moot issue, and some instinct had sent him in the opposite direction: from the Nazi Mercedes-Benz company to that perfectly all-American anti-Semite Henry Ford.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“That road, as it turned out, would be even lonelier than she had reason to fear.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“I believe people are idiots with a pathetic need to feel special.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“The day still stretched before her, a long straight line to sleep, itself a preamble to waking again with this same terrible feeling of not one wonderful thing to look forward to in the years ahead.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“He thought about why anyone would paint a banana, and what you’d have to paint it with to make sure the paint didn’t peel off, and he wondered why a film of somebody sleeping was art.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Stendahl syndrome” was the name for this, he would eventually learn. Dizziness, confusion, even fainting, usually by foreign visitors in the act of viewing great art. It was called that because the French writer had given its first and best description: I was in a sort of ecstasy … Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul … Life was drained from me … He thanked them, of course, but mostly he hoped they would go away, so he could look at it in peace, and eventually they did.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“He lacked any musicality, for example; that was a disappointment. He lacked a kind of easy friendliness he could see in other people. Finally, and especially after the accident, he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air. On it swirled around him as he struggled to right himself, and sometimes fought a powerful urge for it to simply stop. That was the biggest deficit of all. That impacted everything.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“respected your mother, and she honors that.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“In my yoga class,” she said, “my favorite part is always the namaste, which comes at the end.” And there, she laughed at herself. “As those of us who do yoga know, we love namaste because it comes at the end!” (Much nodding and grinned approval in the congregation of affluent Brooklynites.) “But what does namaste actually mean? It means: I bow to the divine light within you and you bow to the divine light within me. Now I know yoga is not a religion, though we’ve all met practitioners we might describe as fanatics. But this little insight contains a great profundity: all of us, bringing our little lights together to form what the apostles of Jesus might have called ‘the light of the world.’ This”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“She was not yet enough of a New Yorker to recognize the significance of some of Salo’s touchstones: Collegiate, the weekend house on the shore in Rye, the summer camp long associated with Jewish families of a certain financial stratum, and above all the Oppenheimer apartment on Fifth Avenue, in a 1915 limestone co-op that had once been resolutely off-limits to Jewish people, no matter how much money they had. This”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“This was the flaw in making a bargain with yourself. There is no one else there to agree to the terms.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“estranged”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. —C. K. Chesterton, via Evelyn Waugh”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“people with different ideas from one’s own were not the enemy; they were simply people with different ideas. Hearing them out carried, he supposed, some small potential for having one’s mind changed, but it was far more likely to strengthen the opinion you already had, so why all the fear?”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“He would spend a lot of time in Aaron’s office, though never for the typical reasons a restless boy might be compelled to see the principal: cheating, pot brownies, AOL unkindness.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Or we of the tribe who delude ourselves into thinking the Orioles will one day win the World Series!”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“Chapter Five Already Gone In which the Oppenheimer triplets arrive and immediately commence to grow apart Lewyn’s first memory was of a rocky beach (later to be identified as the one behind our Vineyard cottage), and a long strand of brown seaweed he held up to the sun. Harrison’s first memory was of Jürgen the dog, growling at him. Sally’s first memory was of her brother Harrison grabbing a piece of apple out of her brother Lewyn’s grubby hand. What was the first shared memory? Settling on even that trifling common denominator would have required conversation and the acknowledgment of a shared history, and that was not to be, at least not while they were still children. Harrison, who did most things first, would opt out before the other two, but Sally wasn’t far behind. Lewyn, poor Lewyn, held on longer than would be reasonable to anyone else. In fact, he wouldn’t give up entirely until his sister dismissed him at the start of their shared freshman year at their mutual alma mater. But without the cooperation of the others, did it ever matter what Lewyn wanted? Only days before their arrival, the house in Brooklyn Heights had been cavernous and still, classically proportioned rooms full of air, with only an immobile woman upstairs in the bedroom and a lazy dachshund”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“I remembered the room, on the third floor, which had a massive four-poster bed (this had also, apparently, come with the house; I could hardly imagine getting it in or out!),”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer

“It means: I bow to the divine light within you and you bow to the divine light within me.”
― Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer