Grant Ginder > Quotes

“They were going to lose parts of themselves that they had thought were irreplaceable, only to find that they didn't miss them at all. There was no other option, nothing else to do. Because staying young forever wasn't just impossible - it was exhausting. No one was meant to shoulder that amount of possibility for very long.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“A fragile belief that the agony of consciousness was worth the miracle of being alive.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“For years and years she had told herself that she was going to be different. But now she saw that what she had really meant was that she was never going to get old, which was funny in retrospect, because getting old was what she had been doing all along.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“This is true: if there was one thing my father taught me, it's that endings never work out the way you want them to--that they're terrible, and this one is no different. They're like the last drops of wine, the final puffs of a cigarette. They're Sunday nights, or the last afternoon of summer. They're flat tires and wet pairs of socks and cold dinners. They're the sort of thing that--no matter the effort, no matter the discipline--no one can get right.”
― Grant Ginder, Driver's Education

“Lately she had been having this strange experience of waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who she was—that was the only way to describe it. The feeling wasn’t figurative, but literal: when she looked around her bedroom in Tribeca, she didn’t recognize her life. How had she become so old, so young? It was as if she had taken over the body of another character—one who was a wife and a mother—and was now expected to play its part. But recently the lines of dialogue had diminished, and what she had been left with was a set of camera angles and stage directions and a script that she couldn’t remember ever having been given.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“She thought about how strange time was - the sly way it had of making things precious.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“He wanted to think about how incredible it was that even on the shittiest, grief-stricken days, life could rearrange itself to reveal those little pockets of joy.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“He had wanted to see people who knew him when he was young, before he got married or had children or signed divorce papers, because he thought that doing so might help him feel a bit more like himself, as opposed to the version of himself that he felt like he had been pretending to be for the last twenty years. But now that he was standing here alone, he considered the possibility that he hadn’t been pretending to be anyone—that instead he had changed in real and unrecognizable ways.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“so easy to be cruel—kindness, on the other hand, required a tremendous amount of work.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“She was a human being. No single one of those identities would ever contain her. Instead she was going to wake up every day, and smile at her husband, and privately wonder whether he was the best or worst decision of her life.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“She wanted to feel like everything was in front of her again, like life was stretched out, wild and open at her feet.
She thought: Well, why not, it could be, it always could be, and realized she had begun to cry.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“Inside the house he found the bathroom, where a battery-operated witch cackled as it twirled from an overhead light. Looking at himself in the mirror, he fixed his hair and washed his hands. The liquid soap that was next to the sink was an expensive brand, though when he pumped a dollop of it onto his palms he discovered that Sasha had refilled the bottle with something generic and lemon-scented. Richie sighed: they were all trying so hard.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“It had all happened so quickly. In her late twenties, when everyone was getting married, the transformations were gradual—you had the chance to adjust to someone’s new boyfriend or girlfriend, until eventually it seemed like they had always been there. Babies were different—babies were tornados. The wind picked up, the sky turned green, and suddenly a relationship that had been standing there for twenty years was ripped from the ground and carried away.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“Relationships are awful. They’ll kill you, right up to the point where they start saving your life.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“Forgiveness, she decided, wasn’t forgetting someone’s sins. It was remembering who they were before they committed them.”
― Grant Ginder, Honestly, We Meant Well

“He considered the possibility that perhaps living was about having as many lives as possible, and this was how his next one was meant to begin.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“She wished Adam would do it for her, and say something funny about Lev that she could get behind, but she knew that this was unlikely: Adam would never say something cruel for the sake of saying it. Once in a while it would be nice if he could also be a dick.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“Love may disappoint, but that doesn't absolve us from the duty of loving. Of trying to love.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“Once, Mia had compared him to a roll of duct tape. He still counted it among the greatest compliments of his life.”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“Fate is just the name narcissists give to Coincidence.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“Eloise, look, you’ll be disappointed, okay? Love disappoints. It can’t help itself. That’s why … I don’t know, that’s why Ingrid Bergman gets on the plane and leaves Casablanca, or Maude takes all those sleeping pills at the end of Harold and Maude. But what are we supposed to do? Stop trying? Preemptively say fuck it because we know everything invariably ends? That’s bullshit. You hear me? Bullshit. Love may disappoint, but that doesn’t absolve us from the duty of loving. Of trying to love.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“She wondered if this was the moment when she’d actually grow old—not her marriage, or two pregnancies, or passing the bar, but this: the realization that the worst could, and would, happen to her, that tragedy wasn’t only meant for someone else.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“There are no surprises, he decides. Just futures he’s been too lazy to imagine.”
― Grant Ginder

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with this thing?"
"You're supposed to eat it," Cate says.
"With what? A forklift?”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“I have a life, you know.” “You’re implying that I don’t.” “I didn’t say that.” “You didn’t have to. That’s what makes it an implication.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“In appearance, they are nearly identical....They could also lead him anywhere. To more forked roads; to dead ends; to Greta. If New York is a grid, Paris is a handful of spaghetti, dropped on the floor by a toddler.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“I know they may seem like a handful,” she says, “but they really are good people.” Alice opts against pointing out the obvious to her sister: that if you have to describe a person as good, then chances are she’s not.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“She listened to it for ten minutes before becoming overcome by a familiar mix of rage and powerlessness”
― Grant Ginder, So Old, So Young

“quick”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“None of it was ever enough, and all of it was exhausting. Living up to my mother’s impossible expectations, knowing that whatever I did would always only be halfway to good.”
― Grant Ginder