Anna Pitoniak > Quotes

“It wasn’t that my personality changed when I met Stella. It was that it became, it flourished, because I could say things to Stella that I wouldn’t have said to anyone back home—knowing they would only respond with bafflement, or laughter—and she always volleyed right back, sharpening me like a whetstone to a knife. I didn’t just want the friendship of this dazzling girl. I wanted the world that had made her so dazzling in the first place.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Stella was the vine wrapped around the limbs of my tree, and even though I had branches that were dead and dangling and should have fallen off long ago, she kept them in place.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“It's so tempting. Being told: this is who you are. This is how your life will go. This is what will make you happy. You will go to the right school, find the right job, marry the right man. You'll do those things, and even if they feel wrong, you'll keep doing them. Even if it breaks your heart, this is the way it's done.”
― Anna Pitoniak, The Futures

“Lies require noise and misdirection to blend in, silence is the best way to draw the truth to the surface.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Young love goes stale and slackens. You change, and you shed what you no longer need. It’s just part of growing up.”
― Anna Pitoniak

“There are things in life you go through with other people, and there are other you go through alone.”
― Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair

“There was the misery of having too little, but there was also the misery of living among those who believed there was no such thing as too much.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Listening to him complain about Stella was as satisfying as watching a rant-filled hour of cable news that confirmed all of your biases.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“The average American was basically indifferent to the problems of the rest of the world. The average American didn’t have an opinion about, say, how the Chinese government treated their ethnic minorities. Sometimes a sense of outrage grew hot enough to spur the country to action, but most of the time, Americans didn’t bother to expend much energy on dealing with the problems of the rest of the world.”
― Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair

“There were times I’d come close to believing it. If I played by the rules, if I did the right thing, if I put my trust in the mechanism of meritocracy and if I worked hard enough, I could do anything. This was America, after all.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I’d never liked New Year’s Eve. So one year was ending and another beginning—did no one notice that life itself proceeded without interruption, indifferent to your resolutions and reflections?”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I wanted to succeed, to prove that I could do this. I wanted that more badly than I’d ever wanted anything. The world is shaped by powerful forces—politics, finance, media—from which most people live distantly, feeling the ripple effects but never understanding the origin. In the past year, I had finally crossed a crucial threshold. I was standing on the side of actor, not acted-upon. I sensed myself getting stronger, sharper, better. But I also sensed how desire fed on itself. It ballooned inside of me, until it squeezed out room for anything else. Sometimes I wondered whether it was deforming me.
But maybe that was backwards. Maybe you had to be deformed in the first place to be capable of such blistering want. Things weren’t getting pushed out. It was that there’d never been anything else in there. Just a void, waiting to be filled.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“In all my years, I had failed to understand how tenuous their self-assurance was. A life that appeared solid in construction, laid with bricks of wealth and good manners and good genes, was as flimsy as a house of cards.
The Bradleys, it turned out, were just as screwed up as anyone else.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I could close my eyes, and the sounds of the party weren't so different from those in college, but I wasn't tricking myself. The feeling in the air had changed. There was a whole world out there, beyond wherever we were gathered. It didn't matter whether it was a cramped walk-up or a tar rooftop or a weedy backyard strung with lights. How you spent your time was suddenly up to you. There were other options. Infinite, terrifying options opening up like a crevasse and no one to tell you which way to go. I think everyone was wondering, through the haze of weed and beer pong and tequila shots, whether this—right here, right now—was in fact what they were supposed to be doing. I suspected I wasn't alone in detecting a desperation in the muggy air, people laughing too loudly, drinking beer that hadn't been chilled long enough.”
― Anna Pitoniak, The Futures

“Any given day, in any given subway car, there were people who were happier than I, people who were sadder than I. People who had erred and people who had forgiven. I was mortal, imperfect, just like everyone else. It was good to be reminded of that. But that mortality also made me old. I felt like I might vanish in a second. I realized—knowledge that arrived all at once—how much the world would continue to change after I was gone. Someday, people would look back on this era in the same way I had looked back on the settlers of the New World or the cowboys of the West in the slippery pages of my schoolbooks, strangers whose lives were distilled down to a few paragraphs and color illustrations. They would shake their heads, not believing that we could have known so little. It was nearly impossible to imagine the continuity. Then they would turn away from the past and continue their lives in a world transformed by technology or disease or war. By rising oceans or collapsing economies or by something that we—we soon-to-be relics—couldn’t even imagine. But I wanted to. I wanted to imagine, and then to see. I clung to the time I’d been given. I didn’t want to leave.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Futures

“My mother was always falling for those law-of-attraction scams: think like a millionaire and you’ll become a millionaire! She assumed it was as easy as ordering a pizza. But I believed in my own version of the law. You can become a millionaire if you really want it. You just have to bust your ass to get there.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“The things that Oliver liked about me now were the things that would eventually have to disappear, if we stayed together. That’s how it was done, in his world. He wanted to be the kind of man, he thought he was the kind of man, who was progressive and modern and supportive of his ambitious partner. But he also lived in a world of definite rules. After marriage, the women gave up their high-powered jobs. They hired caterers for the dinner parties they were expected to host. Society absorbed them.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I could endure envy. It was the in-between that drove me crazy: pretending to love her, pretending to be happy for her, when the whole thing was a slow torture.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Guilt wasn’t as simple as you might believe. It wasn’t remorse or regret. It wasn’t a desire to go back in time and do things differently. It was walking around with knowledge that you alone possessed. Knowledge that takes up more space because there’s no one to share it with. In its specificity, in its intricacy, in its persistent details—the sloshing of the waves, the dark smear of blood, the coin-like moon—the truth weighed more than a hundred theories combined.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I thought my evasions were clever. I thought, on some level, that Stella wasn’t really listening.
But she was always listening, even when it didn’t appear that way. Tucking away that knowledge for future use.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“He was commanding me to feel his pain, and to nurse him through it. And if this had been four years earlier, I might have. The fancy homes, the vacations, the life of luxury: once upon a time, that would have been sufficient compensation for this kind of emotional labor. But it wasn’t four years earlier. I knew better, by now.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“To be selfish. To be cruel, at times. To harden your heart so that you need no one else. When you realize how powerful this makes you, you keep it to yourself.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“You don’t want someone tripping over himself just because you look pretty that day. You want someone willing to alter the course of his career because of your talent.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“she was the stone soup of friends...”
― Anna Pitoniak, The Futures

“I didn’t just want the friendship of this dazzling girl. I wanted the world that had made her so dazzling in the first place. This was a golden opportunity not to be taken for granted. So I paid attention. I studied everything. I learned the vocabulary and the syntax.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.
That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Over time, I realized that the Bradleys may have liked me as an individual, but they loved me for what I represented. People who came from nothing, who busted their asses to get college scholarships, who hustled into a winning career. Look at me, climbing the ladder at KCN: I was a perfect example of that bootstrappy, self-reliant, equal-opportunity American spirit. (Never mind the various advantages I’d had: my skin color, my good health, my friendship with an heiress.) It allowed the Bradleys to sleep easy at night. To believe that the meritocracy functioned as it was supposed to. Their generosity was real, but Anne and Thomas took a calculated kind of pride in me, like I was proof of a successful charitable experiment...”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“To financially depend on someone—as I did, with the Bradleys—and to sense them tracking your movements, that was unpleasant. Money bought allegiance, and allegiance bought control. Money also insulated its possessors from what people really thought.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“It seemed impossible that this was how life transformed itself: a drive down a road you’d driven so many times before.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Futures

“Especially in New York, especially in this business, getting ahead was the cost of entry. Working was a way of being. Time not spent in pursuit of a larger ambition was time wasted. When asked whether I liked my job at KCN, I always said yes, but I thought, Why are you asking that question? Why is liking the metric? The job was both more than that and less than that. It wasn’t a source of peace and contentment, that was for sure. But it was my means of survival. It paid for rent and food and clothing. It propelled me further and further from the life I’d known before.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People