Nancy Balbirer > Quotes

“Unfortunately, you don’t have the power to make him do anything. You’re not ‘the Douche Whisperer,’ Brenda.”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“Like Anaïs Nin once wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“And we are finally alone. And I look at him across the table, at the boy who is now a man whom I have known and who has known me for so long, and I think to myself, My god, Howie, it’s always been you.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“In the midst of our fourth decades, we were by then learning that very little goes the way you expect—some things turn out better, some things turn out worse, some things don’t turn out at all, and when you feel like you’re in a free fall, the best thing you can do is have faith that if you stick your arms out, come hell or high water, you’ll manage to fly.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“I learned something about myself, and that was that I still loved love. And nothing—not endless heartbreak, not being with the wrong person or even being benumbed via the waterboarding of divorce—would ever change that.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“It’s like—you live in this sheltered, delicate little world, and you believe (or you tell yourself) that you’re living. And then, somewhat miraculously, you get over yourself for five minutes and take a trip to the gloriously beautiful middle of nowhere and discover that while you are most certainly alive, you haven’t actually been living.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“even though I sit in the last row with no one else around me, I am not alone. I feel the energy that has sidled up to the empty seat beside me, and I understand immediately that this is not a person but a thing called Grief. Like a masher trying to put the moves on, Grief inches closer and closer, and though I am terribly intimidated, I lie low, hold my breath, and continue to look straight ahead. The thing is, though, I know that none of this matters—I have finally been caught, and Grief, like the sound of the mourning dove, will continue to stalk me wherever I go. Because, no matter how clever my hiding space, from now on, I will always be in plain sight.”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“No, YOU. You were my first and best reader. You helped me immensely in all those years when the world didn’t quite believe, but you always did. Those summer nights at your apartment in the Village . . . reading my plays . . . I always felt so good when you would read a line and you’d crack up in the middle of it.
That’s when I knew it was truly funny. Of course, I only wrote those plays as an excuse to kiss you. But you knew that. It was always YOU.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“And the reason why so many people in my life, INCLUDING MY EX-WIFE, have said, “Just get together with Nancy already!” is because you have always held a part of me that I could never give to anyone else. I don’t want to live not knowing that there was a great love I left behind because it wasn’t PRACTICAL. Because there was distance and a daughter and a son and exes and a union of two of perhaps not the sanest of writers . . . And you’ve explained your “two divas” theory to me, or the thing where we’re both “flowers,” so we need “gardeners” or some fucking thing, but has any of that really worked for either of us? Because I haven’t found lasting love with anyone else yet. And neither have you.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“Your task,” says the great Sufi mystic Rumi, “is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“I believe you should never blow off a good story just because it’s challenging. I believe that falling off the path is the path. I believe that two things can be true. I believe in Love after Love. I believe in Barbra and Barry and that maybe the best is for last. I believe in saving your napkins. I believe you have no idea how much this means to you. I believe if you count all your Fridays, one of the good ones will turn out to be the best Friday ever. Because even if you can’t imagine it, cuz it’s never happened, when it happens and it’s finally here, you’ll know because you’d imagined it all the time. And anyway—what do you have to lose?”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“I find myself debating which is worse: pining for something you once had but that is now lost, or longing for something you are only just now realizing you never had but wanted and still want desperately?”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“the loss of what one wishes had happened is just as painful, if not more so, than the loss of what has actually been.”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“You were my first and best reader. You helped me immensely in all those years when the world didn’t quite believe, but you always did. Those summer nights at your apartment in the Village . . . reading my plays . . . I always felt so good when you would read a line and you’d crack up in the middle of it. That’s when I knew it was truly funny. Of course, I only wrote those plays as an excuse to kiss you. But you knew that. It was always YOU.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“Maybe it couldn’t live up to her fantasy,” he said. “Maybe it would be something better. Or maybe just something else because it would be real. You know, it’s one thing to protect the possibility of a happy ending. But you don’t wanna be so protective that you don’t even have the possibility of a beginning. Know what I mean?”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“there are only two days when nothing can be done—yesterday and tomorrow.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“sometimes being in a bad thing, a thing with the wrong person, keeps you SAFE. Because love is risky, and when you’re in something that’s wrong, it’s limited and a part of you knows it. You’ll never experience loss in that situation the way you would if it was true love.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance

“To love,” Stephen the Buddhist therapist would many years later frequently intone, “is to become aware of loss with further losses to come. This is why love makes us so anxious even when it is good.”
― Nancy Balbirer, A Marriage in Dog Years

“My affection for her was real. But real love was never there, no matter how hard I tried. But you have always been there. In my mind, in my heart, in my thoughts. The fact is, it’s ALWAYS BEEN YOU. There is zero doubt in my mind we’d be together if we lived in the same city. OR AT LEAST WE WOULD HAVE TRIED.
REALLY TRIED.”
― Nancy Balbirer, Almost Romance