Christine Sneed > Quotes

“You’re recovering from a war, I had said one night. You’re not yourself and won’t be yourself again for a little while longer. The war was being fought internally, of course,”
― Christine Sneed, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories

“There are so many ways of classifying our tendencies, but I think one of the most telling must be this: there are those of us who do not wrestle very often or for very long with our appetites, who can simply say, Enough, and walk away, and those of us who are constantly at odds with how much we desire and what we actually allow ourselves. The gay between desire and restraint: here rages the river of discontent, one that often threatens to overflow its banks.”
― Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said

“It was a temporary state of grace, this upwelling of suspense and happiness, but I knew that every feeling I'd ever had was and would be temporary.”
― Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said

“It is hard to dispute the evidence that we are a race defined to a significant degree by our pettiness, by how vicious our desire is to keep track, to compare, to win.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts

“It was all still there, an immense quilt of bold, fantastical human will: the faded tawny golds and grays of the descending rooftops and scorched chimney pots, the cold steel-blue river with its fabled Left and Right Banks, the towers and steeples and crooked cobblestone streets, bisected by wide, brutish boulevards. As seductive as a mirage, but every slab of stone, every silent or uproarious inch of it, real. She had not returned triumphant as a brilliant painter or a self-made woman whose only worry about money was how to spend it ... but she had come back to Paris anyway. It was hard to imagine being unhappy here.”
― Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said

“Capitalism has been good to me—I won’t dispute that—but it hasn’t been good to everyone, and the number it continues to be good to shrinks every day. If this sounds like socialism or communism, so be it.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“The psychologist who had written the article argued that anger was the number-one social disease in the Western world, but hardly anyone bothered to acknowledge it. They would rather, the psychologist said, worry about quasi-abstractions like terrorist attacks or meteor strikes or alien invasions because these improbable disasters did not require the same painful self-examination that confronting one’s anger did.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“Midlife crises keep happening earlier and earlier. Some people even have two.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“The choices we make and the choices that we allow to be made for us: these are the raw materials that compose our lives.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“is hard to dispute the evidence that we are a race defined to a significant degree by our pettiness, by how vicious our desire is to keep track, to compare, to win.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“little less so. “My”
― Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said

“I realize now that most people don’t do very well with uncertainty because the biggest events in our lives, namely, our births and deaths, are out of our control, so in between these two points, we try as hard as we can, almost to the point of insanity (and beyond, in some cases), to control what we can.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“Jealousy was a universal human weakness, though maybe it was sometimes a strength, in that it was supposed to help you hold on to what or who was important to you.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“I wish he knew how to be happier.” Yet who really does? I wonder. I’m not sure if it’s a skill that can be cultivated or a talent a person is born with. I often think it’s the latter, having seen so many people who should be happy but aren’t, and so many who should be miserable but are decisively the opposite.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“Aging also implies that we will not be loved in the same ways that we were when we were younger. So few of us like change, especially when something is being subtracted rather than added. I don’t think that many of us are conditioned to lose: only to gain, to succeed.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“We are a cheating species, both male and female, whether or not we are famous. Why, I would really like to know, does this fact continue to surprise and scandalize so many people?”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“I can only hope that I have loved the people closest to me more than I have harmed them. This is something, however, that I don’t think anyone can know for sure.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“They are victims of their own appetites,”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“There are countless ways to be unhappy, so many more, it seems to me, than ways to be happy, which could be one of the reasons why happiness is so elusive.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“This can be lonely work, but it connects you to other people in ways that many of the things we could do with our lives do not.”
― Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said

“When I was younger, I didn’t know if I’d care what I looked like after I reached a certain age, but I know now that I will care about it until I die or else senility sets in.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“What I wanted, I realized then, was a Hollywood ending. Every single day, I wanted a Hollywood ending with its hero who saves the people he loves from their worst fears, whether it be violent death via nuclear bomb or murderer’s gun, or a lonely death after a life lived in fear of romantic humiliation.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“He had someone to sleep next to at night. My daughter did not. She had only his word, the next promised assignation, and she must have known by now that a rendezvous wasn’t a given until he stood directly in front of her, clothes on their way to the floor.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel

“My favorite role, I suppose, is the romantic. It’s one that I play well, though romantics are dangerous—to themselves and to their lovers. Sometimes it’s only their stupidity that makes them dangerous. But often it’s also their selfishness.”
― Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts: A Novel