84 Quotes by Stewart O'Nan

Like a funeral, a birthday wasn't yours but for the people who loved you.

Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you've only just opened your eyes.

While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn't the fastest or smartest or best at everything.

It frightens you how practical you can be, how cold, even with your own.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he'd done the same.

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

Getting sentimental," you say, but who are you fooling, you've always been.