22 Quotes by Elizabeth Brundage

I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life?The world is not simple, Claire said. The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.

But you couldn't really start over. That was a huge, modern lie invented by talk-show hosts. Sure you could change things that improved your life, but all the bad stuff lingered. It lingered in your body compromising your organs.

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.

His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies.

It was early still, the sky white, nude.

Whenever he was around, she'd get this look on her face, this kind of radiance. She was a beer poured too fast, her golden liquid spilling over the edge.

Let me tell you about love. Love is a kind of madness and you would follow it anywhere, you don’t care.

Just the word beautiful was seductive – but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing – in the eye of the beholder – but that wasn’t really true anymore.

You couldn’t teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn’t.