Grant Ginder > Quotes

“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

“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

“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 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

“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: A Novel

“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

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

“Oh, come on. I'm kidding. Your situation is very different from mine. I mean, Jane was a poet. No one, under any circumstances, should ever live with a poet.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“The hardest part of a relationship isn’t staying with the people we love—it’s actually getting to know them.”
― Grant Ginder, Grant: Mambo Merengue for Alto Saxophone

“Greta arguing with him and, by extension, with Nancy, would at least feel like a return to the normalcy of a month ago, a time when things like family dinners did not result in someone absconding with a French nationalist, but rather followed a predictable pattern for which Nick became nostalgic: cocktails and ruthless criticism, followed by a nice Pinot Blanc and someone in tears.”
― 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

“...Henrique is very much alive. But the temptation to fantasize, to imagine the thousands of bloody and gruesome ways that her ex-husband could have met his end...She wonders how Kim is conceiving of it....Donna won't give her an explanation. She prefers instead that the stranger she lies to imagine and reimagine Henrique's death on their lunch breaks, their drives home. She comforts herself knowing that, at least, for the next few hours, Kim will be killing Henrique in their mind. A thousand tiny deaths.”
― Grant Ginder

“Wasn't anyone who was or had ever been in love terrified, at least to some tiny degree, of love deciding to take its business elsewhere?”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“I had a shift after lunch, and when I got to the store, Neil was waiting for me by a display of iPhone cases. He had this crazed look in his eyes, like if he didn't get to talk to me his nostrils would consume his entire face, so I ignored him and walked to the opposite end of the store...”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“I'm sorry," I said. "I guess I don't know my own strength."

"What are you talking about -- that was awesome!" the bridge of his nose was all puffy and swollen and his left eye was starting to bruise. "In fact, I'm going to tell the front desk to give you a free class.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“Some entitled 18 y/o man suspicious of female knowledge. They want to know everything, but they’re not willing to work for it. And they’re angry that you did.”
― Grant Ginder

“FUCK THE WARNERS! 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

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

“If a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will, there’s nobody like a relative to do the business. —WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Vanity Fair”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

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

“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

“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

“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

“Inevitably there would be a complaint about dark faces, moving around neighborhoods where they didn't belong, and then another about gay teachers, making queers of their students. A world turned on its head! Tradition being destroyed! A way of life at stake! It didn't matter if it was about headscarves in the Marais, or a fight about bathrooms in North Carolina--the complaint was always the same. Toxic nostalgia porn, is how Nancy likes to describe it. Men who get off by sticking their heads in the sand. Who swear the future is destroying their country, as they pick bones from their teeth.”
― 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

“It was another way to control the shape of a memory, I figured, instead of letting it have a life of its own.”
― Grant Ginder, Let's Not Do That Again

“You’re hungry now. You’re hungry in a way where I actually don’t know how to make you feel whole.”
― Grant Ginder

“She wants to tell them that she’s not that deep, that she no longer has the energy to be manipulative or conniving. She wants to tell them that, sometimes, a sigh is just a sigh.”
― Grant Ginder, The People We Hate at the Wedding

“Upon hearing them, Eloise turns as well. Paul watches as she stares at them, and he wonders what she’s thinking: if she sees love or a letdown; salvation or inconvenience. Reaching down, she gathers up the train of her dress and begins trudging up to them, working her way across the broad swath of grass. He stays behind for a moment, and as his sisters and his mother vanish behind the abbey’s arches and spires he stares upward, past his blinding hangover, to a point in the distance that he can’t quite grasp. A bit of infinity where blue bleeds to white, where absence and hope collide. He thinks of the beautiful, gut-wrenching future awaiting them, and the claw marks they’ve left in everything they’ve given up. He thinks of all the times they’ve faced the world on two steady feet, and all the times he knows it will knock them over to the ground. Mostly, though, he thinks—he forces himself to think—that for today, at least for today, they’ll all be okay.”
― 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