Patricia Marx

“If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.”

“[the truth in regards to studying abroad] "you know what else is nice about being a foreigner? Whatever you do takes place in a capsule that need not be discovered and opened by someone back home. Nothing really counts--it was the life that falls in the forest. That's how I looked at it. I felt free to...oh, I don't know.”

“Dot is lonely. Are you surprised? It's hard to find friends when you're only Dot-sized.”

“But that's typical of me. "This is going to end in tears," I tell myself every time I balance a cup of coffee on the upholstered arm of the chair I'm sitting on. And then, lo and behold, the cup topples and even before it lands, I tell myself, "Told me so!" Not to spell out, or spill out, one of the metaphors of my life, but I always do the stupid thing and then I do it again. I never learn.”

“There better not be a God because I'll be in big trouble.”

“It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits.”

“I love narcissists-even more than they love themselves. You don't have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are the blessed, favored with a front-row seat. ”