84 Quotes by Stewart O'Nan

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

Worry rolls inside you like a wheel.

A gift was what another person thought of you, and over the years he'd come to understand, by consensus, that his children saw him as someone who wore a tie to work, used power tools, played golf and drank scotch, which, while all true, seemed a superficial view of him. And yet when asked directly, he couldn't say what he wanted. Nothing.

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.

Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.

While she was away, he'd forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink--this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He'd survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they'd just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.