Darin Strauss

“Love was now a mild streamlet that advanced in drips around my feet; despite how hard I worked at tenderness, I could not drown in a thing that shallow.”

“Looking back now, there's something that bothers me abut the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn't Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual's quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine's death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.”

“His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren't right even as he couldn't stop presenting them.”

“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”

“I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.”

“Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.”

“The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.”

“Things don't go away. They become you.”

“Self-hate is rarely unconditional.”

“I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.”

“Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.”

“What's impossible to communicate, what you can't experience unless you're part of it, is the sensation of being in a real-life marriage. Even little chats seem to be floating in some kind of really ast liquid, and that vast liquid is the ocean of shared feelings and memories and shorthands, of understanding and misunderstandings between the couple-- their history ocean. More and more of their business tends to go underwater, and so even the important words feel only like individual waves popping up from that ocean. All that context, that history, and those impressions from real life that the couple logs and drowns in, it all washes over everything”

“this empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body.”

“I have come to love you in spite of---" Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?”

“I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.”

“Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate.”