Andrew Neiderman > Quotes

“Eventually we become part of our surroundings, and they become part of us.”
― Andrew Neiderman

“Age is a funny thing. People tend to think it can be measured only by time, but events crowd days into weeks, weeks into months, and months into new years.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Judgement Day

“Human misery was the trough from which she now fed herself and she felt more comfortable in the presence of other unlucky people. It made her feel less alone, less diminished.”
― Andrew Neiderman, The Need

“I couldn’t go on explaining this dread I often felt by blaming it only on him. I had my eyes wide open when I said, ‘I do.’ I oohed and aahed over the engagement ring. I was excited about the honeymoon in Capri. Like his, my heart was young and gay once, too. I was ready to see everything through four eyes and hear everything through four ears. I was willing to compromise my opinions and diminish my ego if it was necessary. In short, I would invest myself in him until death did us part.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“How easy this is going to be, I thought. Why did it take me so long to realize it? I had cut that string long ago. My husband and my daughter lived in their own worlds and really didn’t want me intruding in them. Ronnie and I had a paint-by-numbers marriage now, and I had a paint-by-numbers relationship with my daughter. We moved from one thing to another like the hands of a clock, ticking to do this, ticking to do that, all of it programed and expected. If I threatened or even thought to make any changes, it set off alarms. What would happen to our family clock? It would stop. Could you live with that?”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“And so it begins again …”
― Andrew Neiderman, The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story

“After all, you make so many compromises. You find yourself laughing at things you might never have laughed at previously. Your opinions about so many things change, and not because your husband dominates you so much as because you seek a smoother, less complicated direction to take or accept. Specifically, your thoughts about sex, about what you would do, change. You might eat foods you never really liked, go to places you’d rather avoid, and tolerate friends you wouldn’t spend five minutes with before you were married. You would do this all in the name of love and marriage,”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“The man himself.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Perfect Little Angels

“Why was it a stranger could look at me and immediately see me, but my husband of nearly twenty years could barely see me standing in front of him most of the time? Do we eventually wear each other, put on each other like a pair of old gloves, hardly noticing what we’re doing because we’ve done it so often?”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“he simply and probably naively assumed so much about me, about us. Right now, it didn’t occur to him that I wouldn’t agree with his political thoughts, or that I would dislike to make something he enjoyed eating. It was as if he believed that I would always trim and cut around my thoughts and feelings so they would slip in comfortably beside his own. He was confident that my surrender or compromise was part of that famous female DNA”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“the envy of my bridesmaids and girlfriends. How pretty I was and how handsome Ronnie looked. Even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t detect a single doubt, a single threat, an iota of anything ominous. Was everything in life an illusion?”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“It’s as if you’ve already crossed over; the devil has won your soul. Additional stains don’t matter. And yet this wasn’t true for me. The idea of fudging my time and squeezing out more money for the work I had done hadn’t even occurred to me. Did that mean I had successfully rationalized my adultery, that somehow what I was doing was not immoral and therefore I still had a lily-white soul to protect?”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“I didn’t want to look at him through rose-colored glasses, knowing all along that what I was seeing could very well be untrue, and yet when I was with him, I welcomed my refusal to search for and find flaws. The irony was I was often sickened by the way my girlfriends made excuses for their husbands, even the way I sometimes made excuses for Ronnie. Of course, we were really making excuses for ourselves, finding ways not to look like fools.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Skype or FaceTime or whatever Internet magic puts husband and wife on a computer screen. Until they find a way to convey touch, it doesn’t do more than increase your longing.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Off in the distance, the clouds seemed to part to make way for a commercial jet. People on board were getting excited. They were probably coming home. What feeling could match that? I thought.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Right now, my husband, Ronnie, is in his home office on his computer, forwarding political diatribes and jokes to his ditto compatriots who watch the same television talk shows and listen to the same radio talk show hosts parroting each other in a wide echo chamber. Although I can’t imagine why, it invigorates him. When he finally does come up for air, he has his chest out and a broad butter smile smeared over his face. He looks as if he has accomplished something important, as if he knows something the rest of the world doesn’t know.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“don’t say “pity” again,’ I warned. ‘I blame myself for who I am and where I am, and that includes friends and family.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe you are too hard on yourself. You can’t underestimate the power of coincidence and fate. They have a lot to do with who and what you are. Look at us. If I hadn’t been standing in that spot in the supermarket and you weren’t distracted, we might never have met.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“To become somebody,first you need to be under somebodie's supervision.”
― Andrew Neiderman

“Ronnie is in the living room now. He has satisfied his computer addiction and is shifting through channels. We have something like four hundred or so choices, but he rarely finds anything he thinks he’ll enjoy. It’s difficult to watch television with him because, like someone with attention deficit disorder, he’ll abruptly flip the channel to something else, calling what he started to watch ‘crap’ or ‘boring’. Between him and Kelly, the word ‘boring’ seems to characterize ninety percent of life. I think they expect to wake up and go to sleep to fireworks. They’re both always looking for distractions, action, excitement and noise. I know what they believe: stillness is dangerous. Silence encourages people to start getting philosophical which always leads to being maudlin and depressing. Ugh. Usually”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“I think you stop trusting your husband or your lover when you realize he has practically memorized each and every one of your reactions to anything and everything. He’s like a taxicab driver who knows every turn, every bump in the road, and knows when to slow down and when to speed up. Surprise diminishes and diminishes until it’s almost non-existent. You know he knows how you will react and plans for it. You no longer believe in what you see in his face and hear in his words. He’s drifted away under the camouflage woven out of your own reactions and words.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Every woman wants a magic mirror; not one that tells her she’s the prettiest of them all necessarily, but one that reflects back an image of what she would like to see. In this mirror, she can cure all wrinkles and imperfections. The ravages of time melt away quickly. It’s more than just the makeup. It’s what makes us all Cinderellas. We can be potential princesses, models, movie stars, until the clock strikes twelve. Just sit here long enough to hypnotize yourself, I thought.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“it often occurred to me that there was a time before family radios and television when people had nothing but themselves for entertainment. The point I thought we missed about all that was that in those days – the ‘olden days’, as Ronnie puts it – there was little to take you out of your home. Television did more because there was little left to the imagination. You were captured totally in someone else’s imagination, whether it was the set designs, the settings chosen or the lighting and sound to accompany the actors. Computers wired you to the outside world in a much more complete way. It was something you did alone. Ronnie tried to get me to go into his office to witness what he was seeing, but for the most part he was oblivious to everything and everyone else around him. He was truly gone for those hours he spent reading emails, sending them, copying and pasting in quotes and jokes, and reading the blogs he favored.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“I have heard my girlfriends say that making love with their husbands had become as ritualistic and as ordinary as brushing their teeth. Some were clever enough to realize that their husbands made love out of fear. With all the talk about erectile dysfunction, the commercials about the loss of testosterone, men were haunted by the images of limp penises. Every successful act of sexual intercourse reaffirmed their manhood. For many, it could have been with any vagina. The important thing was to reach that climax and, oh, by the way, trigger at least one climax in his wife, if possible. But hey, if she didn’t have it, that was her fault. Maybe she was the one who needed hormones and not me.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Nothing's wrong. I just can't believe how fast all this is happening. I feelas if I'm being ripped out of one world and placed into a completely different one overnight- Miriam”
― Andrew Neiderman, The Devil's Advocate

“more unselfish than I had been. What was I doing now? Was I finally overcoming that? Were my needs demanding to be addressed, no matter what the potential risk? Was it my time? Did all adulterers go through a similar self-analysis or didn’t they give it a second thought? It was certainly easier not to think about it. Could I do that? Could I avoid imagining Kelly’s reaction when or if she found out?”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Nothing or no one demands you be elsewhere before that happens?’ ‘No. Envy me?’ ‘Who wouldn’t?’ ‘Oh, there are old home bodies, even your age or less, who couldn’t care less about traveling and shedding responsibilities. You know that. Not everyone has that hunger, that thirst and desire to experience and consume from the wonderful smorgasbord waiting out there.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“Come to think of it, though, what decisions did most of the wives I knew make on their own? Clothes? Hair and nails? Maybe what was for dinner? None of them made any dramatic changes in their homes without first consulting their husbands. It didn’t sound as if it offered them any true self-respect, but the women I knew who led very independent lives had marriages that reminded me of the line ‘We shared coffee,’ as an answer to the question ‘What was your married life like?’ They resembled the German Confederation, the Deutsche Bund, a loose association of Central European states, more than they resembled the United States. Eventually, they broke completely loose. Was that where I was heading? As soon as I stepped into the house,”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“I’m beginning to suffer from the ennui of near perfection. I long to be threatened, as illogical and maddening as that might sound. There are parts of me that haven’t been challenged for years and consequently have become dull. There are no edges, no cliffs and no deeply threatening potholes on the monotonous road I travel daily. My home has become a space station. Neither my husband nor my daughter seems to notice that lately, when I leave it, I come rushing back as if I am running low on oxygen out there. Sometimes, I literally gasp when I step back inside and close the door behind me. It takes a while for my heart to stop racing and my palms to stop sweating. My urge to explore is dwindling. It’s barely a spark.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“As I looked across the table at Ronnie and watched how he studied this uncomplicated menu, I wondered if the simple answer to all bad marriages is that one outgrows the other. Maybe people shouldn’t marry until they’re in their fifties.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense

“would have mentioned what years of being with one person really means. You get used to each other’s little peculiarities and habits. Maybe this was why we had so many similar thoughts simultaneously. We could anticipate so much about each other. And yet what did it really mean that, after all these years, Ronnie didn’t have an inkling about my affair? Was it his indifference to me or my ability to disguise and hide the truth from him? Rarely did I ever show interest in any other man. I even hesitated to point out a good-looking actor. It was as if I thought I might open up some floodgate and all my doubts and complaints would come pouring out in the open.”
― Andrew Neiderman, Lost in His Eyes: Romantic suspense