Amy Waldman

“Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.”

“Tears filled Claire’s eyes but, as if they knew their place, didn’t leave.”

“She ate ramen noodles from the vending machine, their texture just a few molecular recombinations from the Styrofoam cup containing them.”

“Its walls were mirrored, its tables marble, its espresso feral, its pastry stale.”

“Shut up, you fat water buffalo, rolling in the mud of other people's lives, is what she wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and reminded herself of how Mrs. Mahmoud had held her hand through Abdul's birth, which made her think that if she had found strength enough to push him out, she could hold her meanest comments in. At this moment, it seemed harder.”

“Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.”

“Stumble on joy"--the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy?”

“Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.”

“There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.”

“Sorrow can be a bully.”

“Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.”

“The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness.”

“In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.”

“Debbie's facts coincided miraculously with her opinions”

“Don't succumb to the fear; don't mistake the absolutism of Khan's opposition for morality”

“The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes”

“Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.”

“Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don't you stay home?”