Benjamin Markovits > Quotes

“just wanted to sit around and read books for the rest of my life.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives

“is the idea of healing to get you back to the way you used to be or to turn you into something new?”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives

“I felt like I was falling in love but maybe not just with her, with something else, another world, but maybe that's always what falling in love is like.”
― Benjamin Markovits

“When you live secretly it puts you in a lot of these positions, where you end up doing things you have no real conviction about. But fine, whatever, you just have to get through it.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“this is a girl who lives in a TV-show version of her own life, where she thinks the camera is always on her.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“Mostly mine. I’m just … a little adrift right now. I can’t seem to get a grip on anything.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives

“None of it matched, but everything blended together.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“You fall in love with somebody when you’re twenty-six, and you see them in all kinds of different lights and according to their potential, but after years and years of marriage and shared parenting and all the other shared decisions you have to make just to get through the days, you accumulate a lot of data about that person that after a while just seems… more or less accurate. If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault. So if you stay married it’s because you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“It made me feel funny to look at them; I don’t know what you’re supposed to feel. Even at fifty-two Amy was still the more conventionally attractive woman, and wore skinny Veronica Beard jeans and clogs and a linen shirt. Whereas Miri dressed like the boys I went to high school with, who didn’t care what they looked like. She had a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt on, which was two sizes too big, and other than that you couldn’t really see what she was wearing. But if you had to bet on one of them in a fight, or even just… which of these people is going to have a happy life, you’d bet on Miri. At some level everything you feel or think is a kind of taking sides.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“Something else to be grateful for: the gentle protection of uneventfulness.”
― Benjamin Markovits, Fathers and Daughters: A Novel

“had a sense of undigested emotional material”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

“One of the things in life that I’m grateful for is that my daughter believes I totally adore her; that even when she screws up or gets something wrong, she has no real faults; that she has nothing to prove with me, which is not how she feels around her mother.”
― Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel