"My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm."
"I don't feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don't feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear."
"Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed."
"Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again."
"Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?"
"We will have a happy marriage if it kills him."
"Desi has loved me ever since the lie, I know he pictures making love to me, how gentle and reassuring he would be as he plunged into me, stroking my hair. I know he pictures me crying softly as I give myself to him."
"I know, I know, I'm being a girl."
"I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all."
"I don't feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don't clarify, I don't doubt, I don't worry. I don't tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can."
"Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past."
"I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one."
"Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds."
"We named the bar The Bar. "People will think we're ironic instead of creatively bankrupt," my sister reasoned.Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers - that the name was a joke no one else would really get, like we did. Not meta-get ... But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, "I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Audrey Hepburn's cat was named Cat."
"I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again."
"in these shitty plastic days ..."
"She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone."
"I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn't perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn't fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn't perfect."
"He wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better."
"It was one of the few stories we told the same way."
"We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves."
"My brain is so busy with Nick thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head: Nicknicknicknicknick! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides. I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.Is that wrong? I don’t even know anymore."
"Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. 'Stop thinking', swig, 'empty your head', swig, 'now, seriously empty your head'."
"Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic."
"I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy?"