101 Quotes by Rebecca Makkai

- the way a person could change, and yet you couldn't let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.

I feel like such an idiot. That I ever thought I could have a really good life.

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

We never let go of that,' Cecily said. 'I mean, even for parents - that's never not your baby, you know?'"I think you're right." As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people--of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they'd ever represented, every promise.

She'd figure it out herself, sooner or later-the way a person could change, and yet you couldn't let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.

She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously.

Stupid men and their stupid violence. Tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick?

He thought of Nora's idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn't what she'd meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed.

The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.