Home > Author > Jessica Anya Blau
1 " She understands suddenly that the stuff that fills her up is not the love or attention she might get from other people; it is the love she herself has for other people. We are, Portia decides, the people we love "
― Jessica Anya Blau , Drinking Closer to Home
2 " Well, we're all addicts of some sort...part of being alive is figuring out the balance between what you want, what you need, and what you have with what you don't want, don't need, and don't have "
― Jessica Anya Blau , Mary Jane
3 " And I also wanted to tell her how much I loved cooking for the Cones. How cooking for people you love feels less like a chore and more like a way of saying I love you. "
4 " ... I hadn't understood that people you loved could do things you didn't love. And, still, you could keep loving them. "
5 " In the Cone family, there was no such thing as containment. Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire house. I was terrified of what I might witness or hear tonight. But along with that terror, my fondness for the Cones only grew. To feel something was to feel alive. And to feel alive was starting to feel like love. "
6 " It had never before occurred to me that sometimes dishes weren’t just dishes, that things could represent ideas in more powerful ways than the ideas themselves. "
7 " Fear, I suddenly realized, was an emotion that ran through my home with the constant, buzzing current of a plugged-in appliance. "
8 " Maybe a person’s standing in the community was an illusion. Like the witch in the Cone house. An imagined evil that created unnecessary rules. "
9 " Part of being alive is figuring out the balance between what you want, what you need, and what you have with what you don't want, don't need and don't have. "
10 " But being a doctor makes up for being a Jew. "
11 " Maybe being famous like Sheba gave you so many advantages that you knew there was no point in wishing you were someone else. I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be someone else. "
12 " Was he doing his addict?” “Yes. He was doing his addict. "
13 " What had happened last night seemed so horrible. But after that cry, and then the laugh, I felt ridiculously happy. "
14 " I think we did it right those couple of months, don't you? Great food, great music, and great fun. Don't ever let anyone tell you that fun isn't important because, damn, Mary Jane, if there's one thing I've learned in my strange life, it's that fun counts. "
15 " But foolish moments like this seemed worth the thrill and unexpected intimacy of being in on things with the adults. "
16 " I hadn’t understood that people you loved could do things you didn’t love. And, still, you could keep loving them. "
17 " We'd learned about the Holocaust in school, just like we'd learned about the civil rights movement. What we'd never learned was that sometimes the people who kept those ideas alive were the people you lived with. "
18 " Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire hose. "
19 " That I now understood that cleanliness and order were nice, but giving love, feeling love, and showing love trumped housework? That "
20 " The Cones seemed anti-fancy, with Izzy standing on the dining room table, peeing on the beach, and coloring penises in her anatomy coloring book. "
