Adam Ross > Quotes

“You know, as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now. I think sins are what you ignore.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“He closed his eyes, shook his head. If he could get her alone somewhere, somewhere completely private, he'd kill her. He would break a rock over her head and split her skull open so that he could see, just for a second, what the fuck was in her mind.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“A man who loves his mother too much is someone who can never love his wife enough.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“The heart," he said, "is half criminal. The trick is to be vigilant. To keep your eyes open, so if you get a look at this side of yourself you can make a positive ID.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“...in response to whatever Alice was struggling with, whatever had caused her to withdraw from him, he had chosen the arms of another woman instead of relying on his own fortitude, as if he'd somehow deserved more comfort than Alice herself had been able to give, or not. Which was part of marriage, after all, part of the vows: enduring those times. And this sense of entitlement seemed to him an even greater sin than infidelity.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“The thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune's as random as the thought.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“It is possible, he thought, to be completely happy in marriage--though you must be willing to hold on when your ship was lost at sea and there was no guarantee of rescue.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“It's amazing what we believe if we hear it at the right time," Harold said.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“Of all the thoughts we think, it's only those that actually manifest themselves that seem significant. But the thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune's as random as the thought." - Nathan Harold”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.”
― Adam Ross

“Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you ask someone to marry you and the person pukes, that's a sign.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like--to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“I'm here for several reason, Mr. Pepin, first of all for aid. When something tragic happens in our skies, we do our utmost to extend sympathy. But sympathy without action,that's an empty emotion. Mainly I'm here for the purposes of reentry."
"I don't understand."
"Adjustment," Harold said, "to earth. I'm here to make sure you didn't leave your whole life in the sky.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“And then he laughed that rich man’s laugh of his. A sound that affirmed what Elliott would say to me later that year: judge people not by how they lose, but how they win.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“So how do you stop it from happening?” I asked. “Infidelity, or disappointment?” Elliott said. He chuckled. He had green eyes that slit handsomely when he smiled, and I could tell he was deeply pleased that after eight years of therapy we’d finally got on to a subject worth talking about. “Well, for one thing, you lower your expectations. Nobody’s perfect, most especially you. Best to perfect yourself before finding fault with your partner.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“She elicited in men one of the most consuming desires there was, which was to rescue her.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Twice in my life, perhaps, would I subsequently recall being so captivated by the sight of someone, would time itself feel so arrested. But this was the first. Its effect was at once clarifying and total.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Worse, he seemed as impassive as some of the killers he'd interrogated. That more than anything was what struck him. Men who killed serially suffered a unique lack of affect. You felt this in advance, a physical pressure before they entered a room. There was something impenetrable and thick behind their eyes, a gaze that was shark-dumb. They were people, Hastroll thought, who could not be touched by love.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

“Oren won handily, and we moved on to Monopoly, which was interrupted by dinner, which on our last night was always lasagna: Auntie Maine’s recipe was at least ten layers, and we dipped our artichoke leaves in mayonnaise and Oren let me eat his heart.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Elliott and Sam were arguing heatedly. “If it moves,” Sam said, “they tax it. If it keeps moving, they regulate it. And if it stops moving, they subsidize it. But not Reagan, I guarantee it.” In response to which Elliott shook his head and said, “The only authentic form of trickle-down economics is the president’s character.” And then I noticed Naomi wave my parents over to her.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“But mostly, infidelity is a case of what I like to call the practical use of other people... We start to feel invisible to the person with whom we're most intimate. We desperately want to be seen by them. But rather than address it with our partner and, God forbid, risk them ignoring us, we instead seek to become the apple of someone else's eye, which causes us to drift further from our beloved until they finally notice our absence. Or don't. Which confirms our invisibility either way... And that absolves us from the responsibility of owning our feelings.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Because I realized that I hated him. I always had, all these years. Not for who he was or what he wanted. I hated him because he’d showed me who he was without knowing he had. Because I knew him better than he knew himself, and this seemed the very condition of his being an adult.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“Is it red or black?” Oren asked. “My dear boy,” Sam said, tilting the rearview mirror so he could look my brother in the eye, “I think we both know the Ferrari only comes in one color.” Confused, Oren said, “What’s that?” “Fast.”
― Adam Ross, Playworld

“we’ll focus as well on the male media establishment’s subsequent attempts,” the professor continued, “to assimilate or, as the case may be, subjugate this Janus-faced Venus by using acceptable but often demeaning tropes and sexualized images, an endeavor that was and remains fraught with violence—a gang rape, if you will, perpetrated by the mad men of Madison Avenue.”
― Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut