Cara Hoffman > Quotes

“Sometimes she felt she had fallen asleep inside herself while she was wide awake working.”
― Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty

“'A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.' He said pretty like he meant something else.”
― Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty

“How disposable is a woman's life? How expected. How unsurprising. How normal. How many times a week, a month, a year does that happen?”
― Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty

“This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that.”
― Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty

“Suicide is now the leading cause of death for US service members and veterans, far outstripping combat-related deaths.”
― Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

“What's wrong with you, Daniel? How can you laugh about these things?" And I'm like, 'Cause crying only gets you halfway there, duh.”
― Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You

“Now that she’d done her own tour she could see a little bit of the war in him, his familiarity with silences, his drive, a reconciled sorrow that lifted the corners of his mouth in a kind of mocking self-abnegation. The weight of being alive, being a victim of the killing you’ve done.”
― Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You: A Novel

“She was either never or always afraid... She knew now that the difference between never and always was small. Never and always are separated by a wasp’s waist, a small sliver of safety glass, one bead of sweat; separated by the seven seconds it takes to exhale the air from your lungs, to make your body as still as the corpse you are about to create.”
― Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You

“Bridey found something transcendent in broken men; read them, not for signs of what they might do to her, but as if they were oracles revealing cracks in the barrier between one world and another.”
― Cara Hoffman, Running