Scribbling Cynic

"How could she have known what a girl's laughter does to a boy? If she believed the boardwalk T-shirts, a woman was a ball 0r chain, someone stupid you're with, someone to lie to so a man can drink beer. If she believed television fathers, women were a constant pain, wanting red roses or a nice dinner out. If she learned how to be a girl from songs, it was worse. If she learned from other girls, worse still."

"Graduate school was the part of my life when I had the most free time and the fewest obligations, when I discussed fiction the most and read it the least. But it was hard to focus when you were, like a pupa, in the process of becoming yourself."

"There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude--a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one's solitude is geographical--one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries."

"People you love deeply become elemental. To hear they won't be there any more is like hearing the air or ocean won't be. It feels like a fatal disruption to the universe."

"She pictures Bear online, researching. Pictures him in the showroom, her beautiful husband, doing something lovely for her in the middle of an ordinary day, before the world shut down. Where was she then? Perhaps walking along the seafront, or at the library. And she'd carried on, unaware. Of him, and this special thing. Unaware, too, of what it is to have that person in your life, that person who will plan surprises, who will try to fix wings to your back."

"Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honor and Phoebe has never been a maid of honor. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her."

"And this, Reese reflects, is the other reason to be a mother--in whatever fashion motherhood comes your way--so when you're old and alone and feeling sorry for yourself, your daughter will roll her eyes at your theatrics and bring you in the from the cold."

“Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”

At home, Joy inspires an alchemic shift in Wren's perspective. Wren no longer sees life as a long, linear ladder with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.

It's been two and a half years since Sasha brought home a newborn for me to care for, and perhaps, like with all new things, the fear disappeared with time. I imagine this feeling isn't so different from that of a new mother. The first child seems so dependent and fragile that it's hard to believe they will ever be anything other than terrifying. Then comes the second child, and maybe a third, and suddenly you have this acute understanding that it is unlikely you will kill the children. In fact, it's far more likely that the children are going to kill you.

That's the thing about cliches. They have enough space for everyone inside, and so they can't help but make a person feel like no one at all.

By the end of the hour, all of them understood the basics of navigation with a compass, or with the sun. If both of those techniques failed, concluded T.J., the most important thing was not to panic. For a bonus, she asked them: Who knew the origins of the word? "Which word?" someone said. "Panic," said T.J. But no one raised a hand. She explained. It came from the Greek god Pan: the god of the woods. He liked to trick people, to confuse and disorient them until they lost their bearings, and their minds. To panic, said T.J., was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend.

“When something changes you constitutionally, you say: ‘The earth moved.’ But the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts.”

"She knew the man was at this moment not going through these mental spirals, was not deconstructing the interaction and litigating it before a fake jury. That's the thing about assholes--they are assholes unreflectively. No asshole thinks to himself: Yeah, that was a quality asshole move. No, they just are. They go around just being, in perfect clueless bliss.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you'd never be able to let go? Now you're not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you're picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you've ever wanted in the world.