Julie G’s Reviews > Mr. Field's Daughter > Status Update

. . . we could stop evaluating each other all the time because we would have aged enough to be past the need for it, somehow, and past the memory of whatever it was we thought we needed from each other, and couldn't give.

From somewhere before she could quite remember, she'd received the impression that everything was in a kind of jeopardy, though she hadn't known the word until recently. The first time she heard it and understood it, she had a small shock of recognition, as though it were a thing she had always known--or had known and then forgotten somehow.

. . . an aging man never minds indications of how others still take him seriously.

Field put his arms around her and rocked with her, and he could feel the valves of his own heart expanding with the ache and happiness of it.

The look on his face made me wish I was dead for ever letting him get close enough for me to hurt him.

He was fifty-two years old, he had a grown son, and these days he felt, most of the time, like a high school kid. His heart raced; his nerves were jangled; he sometimes felt that he couldn't stand straight for the trembling in his knees. Everything upset him, though it was all somehow brighter, too, more vivid.

. . . he was always experiencing the vague sensation of being boggled by the season he happened to be entering as if, once established, a weather pattern ought to continue, like a stage of evolution.

He was not drinking so heavily now, and so it was very soberly that he thought of dying as some consoling thing, a way of leaving the unrecognizable world he now found himself in.