Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye.
In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads
because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up
“I said, just answer the question!” the policeman repeats, with an expression common in grown men who were disappointed by life at some point in their childhood and have never quite managed to stop feeling that way.
The Realtor blinks so slowly that it looks like she’s only just learned how to do it.
Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish
At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.
Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.
Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.
She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.
The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. - I’m sure you’re right.
When Jim was young, children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving
That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.
When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway.
Too much time has passed for the father to ask his son how he’s doing, too much time for the son to be able to explain. The distance between them is too great now.
Neither of them means it. We lie to those we love.
because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.
“Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can’t hate your mom. That it still doesn’t feel like it was her fault.”
“seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.”
“Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that.”
“That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”
“Perhaps you have that in common after all. You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for. But obviously you would still never rob a bank. Of course not. But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. ”
“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves”
“The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.”
“You might not know exactly how it feels, but perhaps you’ve also had moments when you stare at yourself in the mirror and think: This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out. That can terrify a person.”
“The stupidest thing people who have everything think about people who have nothing is that it’s pride that stops a person from asking for help. That’s very rarely the case.”
“She’s somewhere in her fifties, and beautifully dressed in that way that people who have become financially independent on the back of other people’s financial dependency often are.”
“Listen, the problem with the middle class is that you think someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. You can only be too poor.”
“I mean, everyone hates banks. It’s like people say: “Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.”
“The first thing you have to understand is that Zara has recently been seeing a psychologist, because Zara has the sort of career which, if you do it for long enough, sometimes means you have to seek professional help to get instructions on what you can do with your life beyond having a career”
“Sweetie, you aren’t that hard to read. People like you are never as complicated as you’d like to be, especially not if you’ve been to university. Your generation don’t want to study a subject, you just want to study yourselves.”
“The psychologist smiled with the superiority that only someone who thinks of themselves as being a very deep person can.”
“That’s because people like you always look at people who are wealthier than you are and say: ‘Yes, they may be richer, but are they happy?’ As if that was the meaning of life for anyone but a complete idiot, just going around being happy all the time.”
“Zara’s reply was the response of a person who’s spent many years thinking about this. Someone who has decided it was more important for her to do an important job than live a happy life.”
“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”
“You still haven’t answered my question. I asked why you like your job. All you’ve done is tell me why you’re good at it.”
“No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”
“She isn’t traumatized, she isn’t weighed down by any obvious grief. She’s just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one’s supposed to do that.”
“Nadia had felt like that all her life. She had lived among them. Had sat at the dinner table with her parents, thinking: Can’t you see? But they didn’t see, and she didn’t say anything. One day she simply didn’t go to school. She tidied her room and made her bed and left home without a coat because she wouldn’t be needing one. She spent all day in town, freezing, wandering around as if she wanted the town to see her one last time, and understand what it had done by failing to hear her silent screams. She didn’t have any real plan, just a consequence. When sunset came she found herself standing on the railing of the bridge. It was so easy. All she had to do was move one foot, then the other.”
“She was so used to saying what she knew other people wanted to hear, so they wouldn’t worry, that she did it without thinking.”
“Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?”
“People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame.”
“They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.”
“That you get too much time to think. People need a project, so Roger and I became sharks, and if we didn’t keep moving, our marriage wouldn’t get any oxygen. So we buy and renovate and sell, buy and renovate and sell. I did suggest that we try golf instead, but Roger doesn’t like golf.”
“Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents?”