David Gilbert > Quotes

“A brief silence followed, everyone smiling with no direction, one of those awkward moments where families realize they are essentially a collection of strangers with a few things in common...”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“But that's a lie. No, that's life without the f.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“It is easy to love a woman, it is in nature, but art to love a man, and a profound art to want to put your horse in another man's stall.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Andy wondered if Jesus was once a supreme embarrassment to his Father, this hippie carpenter who ran around with the freak crowd until finally he gave up on his dreams and stepped into the family business, probably to his mother's regret. What a sellout, Andy thought. A truly kick-ass Jesus would have said, Go forsake yourself, and remained a humble builder. Now that would have been something to worship: the son of God rejecting God in favor of life, meaning death.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Our oldest friends, their faces, never really change, as we both travel at the same speed of life. Parents and children are different. They help us measure our existence, like the clock on the wall or the watch on our wrist. But old friends carry with them a braided constant, part and whole, all the days in the calendar contained in a glance.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Grace commanded the second pew, her whole family jammed together, the six of them sour yet insistent, like the richest people flying coach, while behind her sat Charles Jr., never Charlie or Chuck, with his two girls, the ever blonde and blonder copies of his wife, who was six months pregnant with what I could only imagine was a blinding ball of blazing white light.”
― David Gilbert

“His brain is frantic with the awful math of diminishing sleep.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Do you know what it comes down to? It comes down to who I am every minute of the day. Every minute of the day is a test whether my thoughts will just stay thoughts and not see the light of day.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“For you are my oldest and dearest friend, Andy. I cannot imagine my life without you. You are an essential gear within my clockwork jewels and without you I am stopped.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Nothing worse than jerks with sudden souls.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Hope in all forms should be distrusted. Hope is dumb breakaway glass shattered on the softest head. Survival maybe, blood and thunder, but not hope. While Billy can appreciate the technology of hope, the well-crafted mechanism of religion, the internal wiring of promise, the silicon of love, he has no idea how the gizmo works. In all likelihood hope would lay in his hands, unresponsive, the On button hidden from sight. He'd end up hammering nails with hope or employing hope as a paperweight, until someone would finally tell him, "Hey, you're using hope all wrong." Hopelessness is what Billy prefers. It has a simpler design and fewer moving parts.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“But your Daddy chose to be a writer and the two of you were frankly fucked. All because I liked how it sounded in my head—no office, no boss, no bureaucracy, no nine-to-five, no desk, he says, having sat behind this desk for the last fifty years. I”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Everyone in this book has harnessed what they have learned during illness together with their ‘previous’ life skills to create something deeper – an enriched expertise.”
― David Gilbert, The Patient Revolution: How We Can Heal the Healthcare System

“No problem, ma'am." Ma'am? Where did that come from? He's far from Southern. Weird how giving directions can make you feel like a minor superhero—Mapman—like all those nothing good deeds where you lend a hand or give up a seat or tell a blind person the light has changed, these things proving yourself—what?—vaguely human. Weird and sad how the slightest drop of your own kindness can fill you up.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Every act of memory is an act of imagination.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Billy watches them, downright stares behind the safety of sunglasses.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Strange, Billy thinks, how clocks can divide and run so differently, how in the meanwhile all assumptions can be rendered false without your knowledge.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Don’t be a ghost haunting your own life.”
― David Gilbert

“Billy apologized with his eyes.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“These men, as she often muttered to friend Eleanor Topping, the two of them pressed together like sisters, their friendship filling in for the matrimonial gaps. These men, romantically isolated, secretly tortured, became like lighthouses flashing their treacherous shallows. Stay away! Stay away!”
― David Gilbert, & Sons

“Billy turned toward his mother. Often, when eye-to-eye with her, he'd wait for some recognition of affection—this was his mother for heaven's sake—and when nothing flashed between them, he would look away.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Plots soothed the boy. And as an adult he can still fall under this spell, especially when his shoes make a certain patter on the pavement and strangers offer him their glance for an extra beat—Billy will start feeling as if he's on a mission even if the mission is buying a loaf of bread. It's almost meditative, his version of yoga where he stretches into the person he wishes he were, all slick and sly. But the balance is tricky. The smallest miscue—pushing instead of pulling on doors, hailing an already taken taxi, pressing and pressing the elevator Close button—can throw him on his back.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“How old is Rufus?" Billy asks.

"He's almost nine. School's just started and he's not a fan. He's been playing sick for the last three days, telling me it's something deep in his belly that won't show up on any thermometer. Insists on sleeping with me and he's a kicker."

"He sounds like a character."

"If by that you mean nightmare, yes, he's a character."

"But you love him."

"Of course I do. My God, that's never a question. He's everything to me.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“The SHAME news event is discussed in terms of I was there, I saw the whole thing, I knew those guys, their own brush with fame springing from someone else's notoriety, a sort of new American celebrity, Billy thinks...”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Billy smiles, the verb hardly doing justice to the thrill in his lips, the vestibule, the commencement of what might follow, of what is already churning in his lungs.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Hello," she says like a mind reader who senses her own presence in your every thought.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Even worse, when he's presented with a sleeve of photos, he will speed-thumb through the Billyless images and only alight on himself—laughing broadly, gesturing slickly, winking cheesily, beaming bogusly, slouching sadly, gawking insanely—and wince. Focus a lens on him and he turns into an adverb.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“So are you saying Christ is just an image?" is yelled.

"I'm not here for a theological debate. But I will say that I think Christ as an idea is fundamentally more important than Christ as a historical fact.”
― David Gilbert, The Normals

“Like many people who have escaped their past, Richard assumed his absence was suffered on an almost daily basis. But really no one missed him much.”
― David Gilbert, & Sons