Kathie

“HE WAS NOT THE BEST
BUT HE WAS THE BEST I EVER HAD”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“America, how’s your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like so many marriages, I know, it was not for love; I know it was for tax reasons, but soon you all found yourselves financially entwined, with shared debts and land purchases and grandiose visions of the future, yet somehow, from the beginning, essentially at odds. Ancient grudges. That split you had—that still stings, doesn’t it? Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it? So how’s it going, America? Do you ever dream of each being on your own again? Never having to be part of someone else’s family squabble? Never having to share a penny? Never having to bear with someone else’s gun hobby, or car obsession, or nutrition craze? Tell me honestly, because I have contemplated marriage and wonder: If it can’t work for you, can it work for any of us?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“He is transported to his childhood when, taken to a show by a neighbor, he watched in awe and thought (as he thought when he first saw the Rocky Mountains): Why did no one tell me life could be this? As if they had been hiding from him that, instead of Puritan hard work and failed get-rich schemes, promises broken and pointless battles waged, life could be sequins and song. He felt he had been lied to from the Pilgrims on down. The secret had been kept from him like a mad aunt locked in the basement, and now a neighbor had innocently set her loose—and she was wonderful! He understood everyone was wrong about life, and if they were wrong about that, then they could be wrong about him. It seemed possible—only for those two hours—that he as well, somewhere inside, could be sequins and song.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost