Awwwtrouble

“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It's like going to meet your new boyfriend's family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It's almost easier to believe I'm real than to understand what's actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.
And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“Grace stood up and turned off the tap. "Yes it was." she looked at Vanessa, at her glassy eyes and her petulant expression; Grace wanted to slap her. "Men like him...they have a special kind of contempt for women like me - ugly women. I've felt it all my life. An ugly woman is barely human to a man like your husband. It's sickening but not all that shocking. What's worse, what is utterly abject, is the way that women like you - the pretty, the chosen - the way you collude in that contempt. simpering like a schoolgirl, because a man has aid you some attention. Laughing cravenly at his cruelties. It's pathetic.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich