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“It never occurred to me to be competitive or even jealous of men. For a long time, I'd worried that it was internalized misogyny before I realized that the only artists I respected enough to envy were women.”

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”

“But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.”

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

“I didn't mark this day more than the others at the time, because nothing ever warns us when we're in the process of experiencing a special day, a beginning and an ending, even when it's a happy beginning, because certain things appear normal or happy, and afterward you see that they become terrible.”

“That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case […] instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted.”

“They had an air of peace about them, Marie and Philip, which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inex-plicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other-the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.”

not so much a true dnf, more like a dnf-yet. too many other reads with more pull atm

“Spring, suddenly warm. Trees announce themselves with miniature leaves [...] Green pushes out the brown everywhere. A kind of amnesia sets in: wasn't it always so?”

“Spring, suddenly warm. Trees announce themselves with miniature leaves.”

“If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning […] was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually as a cold winter noon […] - this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws - that hid within the canonical Four.”

“There is not a fence that will keep out the porcupine; to try is folly. One must pay one's taxes, sometimes.”

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”

“That was it, people moved away, he moved away. Their life in Carricklea, which they had imbued with such drama and significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way.”

“He had thought that being with her would make him feel less lonely, but it only gave his loneliness a new stubborn quality, like it was planted down inside him and impossible to kill.”

‘He's amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it "the pleasure of being touched by great art."’

“Lately he's consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.”

‘Deep soul sigh. "Ulla sees you as an Indian, and you see her as an American. The whole thing is based on a misunderstanding."’

“An arranged-marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.”

“In many ways, Sonia felt as if she had returned to being a child, a more playful child than she had ever been. She thought that this was what people spoke of when they spoke about love: You were outwardly more adult and treated with greater consideration, but secretly you were more childlike, more free, more full of laughter.”

‘"Lonely? Lonely?" said the Colonel's wife.
"Without people one is nothing," said Mina Foi. "Especially in wintertime. It snows nonstop over there."’

“It was essential to remain close to those who had caused you harm so that the ghost of guilt might breathe through their dreams, that their guilt might slowly mature to its fullest potential.”

“Although maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.”

‘"Well, in life there are Parkers and there are Drivers," he began. "Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don't need applause for every little thing. They can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that's enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives."’

“[My husband] Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren't sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.”

“People who spend their entire lives together, he said, develop ways of living together - they provide each other space, they don't say everything they think at the moment they think it, they hold back from expressing themselves in ways that husbands and wives who lead more separate lives typically do not.”

“I said that was what truly broke our heart. To see how hard she was trying. We had tried to make her life easy and we hadn't. I don't mean "easy" in the obvious sense of good houses, good schools, etc. I mean easy in the sense that she would be free of both her own and our history. This seems to be one of the key promises you make when you adopt a child: you will take the child away from his or her history.”

“To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.”

“I walked back to the hotel, and I wondered if it was true, what I had told him, that I didn't need to pretend. Maybe pretense was all there was. Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.”

“I was worried for Jay. He was too sensitive, he had no shield. He was growing up in a culture that was over-legitimizing certain emotions, especially hurt, and encouraging vulnerability without discernment.”