Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes
8 quotes
"When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been."
"Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment."
"Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldn't know."
"We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose."
"My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall."
"There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are."
"But I find something compelling in the game's choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction."
"I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time."