30 Quotes by Linda Holmes

There is no trouble that a good cup of tea can’t solve.

And if you’ve been somebody’s first call, it’s hard not to be their first call anymore. She says it’s one of the reasons why parents sometimes feel sad when their kids are getting married. It’s not just the empty nest. They’re not the first call anymore. I’m not Andy’s first call anymore. It doesn’t mean I want to be his girlfriend, and it doesn’t mean I don’t like her. But it was sad. It’s different. The doctor says it’s important to be sad.

You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom.

I have been lying on my couch for thirteen, going on fourteen months. I have barely gone out. I have fed myself and made ends meet. I hope that’s not the proudest of me you could be. I hope surviving not being married to a doctor anymore is not the greatest thing you can imagine for me. I went to school. I’m going to live another fifty years probably. I hope this isn’t the highlight.

It’s not a question of whether you could try to do it by yourself. You can always try it. But it can be dangerous, and it’s harder. Trying to buck yourself up is the tooth pliers of mental health.

Who eats pumpkin pie in a bathing suit on a boat in the middle of the ocean?

The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental.

He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t. The sixteenth second was a killer.

Instead, for luck, he asked them for 26, because Evvie’s address was 26 Bancroft Street. When he got home and he showed the shirt to Evvie, she said, “Hey, look. That’s my house number. Maybe it’s lucky.” He’d folded it up, saying, “Maybe.