130. Some nights I can't bear to be so alone. This was one of them. You get to a certain age and you realize that you have been spending your working years on life support being transfused against loneliness and only pretending to be alive. And already too drunk to drive, you drive to a bar where no one knows you, so that you can listen in on the other people who don't have to be there alone. All this can happen in your hometown. It can happen to anyone.
160. No one ever told me that deep sadness feels so much like fear.
170. For William, being depressed was egocentric, self-indulgent, weak, and most important, it was spiteful.
177. You learn early from experience that a boyfriend will often want sex when you don't. And it doesn't even take a boyfriend. It can be someone you met in a bar or at a party, the territory of the one-night stand. You want to meet new people, to be admired. You feel relaxed after a few drinks. Then you suddenly find yourself somewhere thinking, I don't really want to go through with this, no anymore, but it's easier to go through with it than to back out. So you go through the motions. You pay lip service to the act. You don't need to be a prostitute for this to happen. The only difference is that we take money for it up front. If everyone knew how easy it really is, after the first couple of times anyway, we'd earn less than waitresses.
192. "You've got to watch those cliches because when the chips are down and the devil's in the detail, the grass is always greener on the other side."
193. There are an infinite number of ways to bring about the damage to a child that is connoted by the term broken home. A full house with two parents can rob you of comfort, stability, and self-esteem as fast and as surely as a crowd can rob you of company.
197. There are lines we cross, all of them pregnant with consequences.
201. Just like a verbal expression, a relationship between two people is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations, but unlike most words, most relationships are seriously ambiguous. If two people have different views, not simply about the state of their relationship, but about its very nature, then that can affect the entire course of their lives.
202. Our capacity to come up with great ideas is exceeded only by our capacity to run them, to destroy what is good in them, to poison them, by taking them to extremes.
275.
"So why do you hate them?"
"I don't hate them. I hated him. I know that you'll say hate is a stupid word."
"Do you think it's a stupid word, or do you think I'm going to tell you it's a stupid word?"
"I think questions like that are stupid. I don't know how any remotely intelligent person can think questions like that can be beneficial to somebody's mental health, and I fucking hate it when you ask them. You charge for this. It's unbelievable."
357. How many people around the world who have not yet fallen off of Alex's graph are eating dinner night after night on their own? There are the divorced. They are the widows and widowers, of course. We think of them as old. They are not all old, but even those who are - are they in some way meant to eat dinner each night on their own? Do they deserve it? Have they earned it? How many nights must you spend alone for every night you were not on your own?
358. You will find yourself drinking alcohol dangerously, without any pretext. Some people drink to celebrate, others to unwind after work, others to lubricate social intercourse. This is not anymore why you drink or why you drink so much more than at any other time in your life. At first, you drink because it's one of the last things that they, the others, the still-functioning, socially participating others do that you can do. Maybe you drink for the taste. Then you drink as a dare. You dare yourself to have another one when it isn't really appropriate, to see whether anyone will notice. But there isn't ever anyone to notice, and you drink upon realization of this. Then you drink to see if you can get from 2:17 p.m. to 3:55 p.m. without noticing the time, without feeling it. The idea of slicing a tomato when you've reached this stage is completely out of the question.
362. You don't need to be seeing someone to be in love with her. You can have lost touch with her, she can have hurt you, even inexplicably. If you ever felt that you really knew her and that it was once what you knew that you loved, and if you still remember what it was you once knew, why is it so crazy to retain that love still?
432. "When people say, 'We were students then,' I'm never sure whether they're attempting to excuse the way they were then or the way they are now. "
455. Ultimately, for all the expert criticism in the world, the test of something as subjective as music or literature or even a relationship is, as E.M. Forster put it, our affection for it. That is why you are apt to get upset when somebody you care about does not share your taste in music or movies or literature.
465. I can understand that now: momentarily losing one's mind. I am even learning to sympathize with it. How hypocritical is it for someone to claim to be perplexed by someone else's momentary loss of himself, when you, yourself, might be said to have lost you mind not for a moment, but for years, not so much lost your mind as lost something else, the name of which is not immediately apparent - call it your "character."
584. I say my friend. I'd like to think that we were friends but who ever knows what people are to each other, right?
586.
"No, no. He knew that I knew...or suspected."
"Suspected that you knew?"
"Knew that I suspected."
604. Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
From Yehuda Amichai:
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours...
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