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61 " Maybe, she thought, it was because it was still too new. It’s foolish to speak of your happiness before you’re sure you have it. "
― Brian Morton , Starting Out in the Evening
62 " Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I’d be a better daughter for him than she is. "
63 " She had a moment of engulfing sadness about this, about the way that even when we’re living through tragedy, the language we reach for, the only language available to us, is secondhand. "
― Brian Morton , Florence Gordon
64 " It was hard for him to insist, because it hurt her, and because he knew it would drive her away. But he couldn’t string a woman along anymore. He felt like a rat, but a rat at peace with itself. "
65 " What you are he said, is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends, and you need someone not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you will always be all right. "
― Brian Morton , Breakable You
66 " Why was it that at every grown-up function, the exact same conversation had to take place? Sometimes Emily felt as if she could hand out scripts, to save everybody the trouble of thinking, except that there would be no point, because they weren't thinking--they were just saying the same things they'd said the last time. "
― Brian Morton
67 " Fear of any undertaking, to her way of thinking, was usually a reason to go ahead with it. "
68 " zebras? "
69 " She knew that this relationship wasn’t as important to him as it was to her. If he was being honest he’d probably admit that she was the second most important thing in his life right now. "
70 " A man can’t understand how a woman feels—how she can offer up her entire life to him. The man thinks she’s bringing him a burden. He doesn’t understand that she’s trying to give him a gift. "
71 " He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time. "
― Brian Morton , A Window Across the River
72 " But whenever Heather felt uncertain about whether to do something, she did it. She had decided long ago that you never learn anything by holding back. "
73 " When she was little, her father, just before he went to bed, used to check his watch and ask in surprise, “How did it get so late so early? "
74 " Schiller had no illusions about the scale of his own achievement, but he had tried, through art, to bring a little more beauty, a little more tolerance, a little more coherence into the world, and now he felt he had earned the right to look back at the statue with an unembarrassed eye. "
75 " Maybe there was nothing to be done but wait out his adolescence, and hope that at the end of it all he might be a person who would want to talk to you. "
76 " And the trick to making anyone happy, and making yourself happy in the bargain, is to bring them not only what they ask for, but to bring them extras. "
77 " If you really listen, you find that most people tell you their life stories as soon as they meet you. Ariel, clearly, was another boring forty-year-old obsessed with her “biological clock. "
78 " This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure that both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book. "
79 " The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them. "
80 " You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It’s like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting. "