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1 " Jimmy gave a startled yelp. She had put cute little candy cane striped glass cocktail stirrers in everyone's drinks and Jimmy had thought they were real candy canes and bitten his in half. "Goodness. I feel dreadful", Jane said to everyone while Jimmy was in the bathroom, spitting out blood and shards of glass. "Should we take him to the ER?" "Oh, he'll be fine," Duncan assured her. "He didn't go to the ER that time he accidentally locked himself into the finishing room and inhaled fumes all night." That didn't seem like the soundest piece of logic to Jane, but Jimmy came back into the room at that moment and said, "I'm OK, really Jane. I'll just keep this napkin in there to stop the bleeding." So Jimmy spent spent the rest of the evening with a white cloth napkin poking out of his mouth and looked vaguely like a trout. "
― Katherine Heiny , Early Morning Riser
2 " Does Gary have to come too?" "You know as well as I do that Gary doesn't like to be alone after dark," Duncan said. "He says the toilet whispers. "
3 " Fun. Wasn't that really the beauty of childhood? That you measured experiences by how much fun they were, not by how much work or inconvenience or tedious conversation they caused you? Of course you didn't think of the tiresome things if you were a kid, because you didn't have to do them. "
― Katherine Heiny , Standard Deviation
4 " Oh, the joy of a shared life! The joy is not - as many people believe - building a future with someone, or opening your heart to another human being, or even the ability to gift each other money with limited tax consequences. The joy is in the dailiness. The joy is having someone who will stop you from hitting the snooze button on the alarm endlessly. The joy is in the smell of someone else's cooking. The joy is knowing that you can call someone and ask him to pick up a gallon of milk on his way over. The joy is having someone to watch "Kitchen Nightmares" with, because it is really no good when you watch it by yourself. The joy is hoping (however unrealistically) that someone else will unload the dishwasher. The joy is having someone listen to the weird cough your car has developed and reassure you that it doesn't sound expensive. The joy is saying how much you want a glass of wine and having someone tell you, "Go ahead, you deserve it!" (Although it's possible to achieve the last one with a pet and a little imagination.) "
5 " Josie thinks that the problem with being a writer is that you miss a lot of your life wondering if the things that happen to you are good enough to use in a story, and most of the time they’re not and you have to make shit up anyway. "
― Katherine Heiny , Single, Carefree, Mellow
6 " It occurred to Graham that here, finally, was the similarity between the two women he’d chosen to marry: they were both totally unrufflable, one out of iciness, the other out of obliviousness. "
7 " You said back then that you were sorry you’d ever met him and that you’d never forgive him for introducing us.” “I know,” Aggie said. “But I thought he would always be there, waiting to be forgiven. "
8 " He glanced across the table at Elspeth and their eyes caught for a second, like two coat hangers before you shake them free of each other. "
9 " You take Boris’s hand as he bounds along on his long legs, your signal that he has to either slow down or pull you along. He tucks both your hand and his hand into the pocket of his jacket. You look up at his face out of the corner of your eye. In the cold, you watch him breathe perfect plumes of white that match the sheepskin lining of his jacket. You think how happy you would be if Boris thought you were half as beautiful as you think he is at this moment. You walk this way for a few minutes. "
10 " Oh, it was horrible to have a teenager’s emotions and a forty-year-old’s body. It was humiliating. It was depressing. It was degrading. "
11 " Maybe in some relationships there was so much history that fondness and guilt and curiosity and familiarity remained separate elements and could never be melted down into friendship. "
12 " It was enough just to sit with him on the porch, looking at the dew sparkling on the grass and the sun shooting biblical-looking rays of light through the pine trees. She should sit out here more often early in the morning. She and Duncan could have coffee here, start their day with calm and beauty. But she knew it was one of those things—like Sunday afternoon drives and mother-daughter yoga class and vacuuming the refrigerator coils—that she would think about but never actually do again, and that made it all the sweeter. "
13 " Rory was a pale, thin boy with no-color hair and eyes as dark and troubled as shadows. He seemed to have a great difficulty finding the bathroom, even though Jane had kept him after school to practice the route."See?" she'd said. "Just come out of the classroom and turn left and walk down this hall and turn right.""That's what I do," Rory said. "And sometimes the bathroom's there, and sometimes it's not.""It's always there," Jane said gently. Did he think it was the Brigadoon of bathrooms? "Maybe sometimes you take a wrong turn. Let's practice again.""That's okay," Rory assured her. "If it's there, I go. If it's not, I hold it. "
14 " People in love were happy because being in love blocked all the other emotions out. "
15 " Sometimes she though being with her mother was like crossing a desert: long, hard stretches of burning sand that exhausted you, but every once in a while, you happened on a little oasis of kindness. "
16 " And yet, he knew Audra did genuinely feel the loss of these conversations, of any conversation that she didn’t get to have. "
17 " All parents want to hear good things about their children, but sometimes you had to say bad things. If you said the bad things to subtly, the parents didn't believe you. If you said the bad things too baldly, the parents got upset. Actually, they often didn't believe you anyway and then they got upset, too. It was like having an intervention for an alcoholic every twenty minutes for an entire working day. "
18 " Here they were grocery shopping in Fairway on a Saturday morning, a normal married thing to do together— although, Graham could not help noticing, they were not doing it together. His wife, Audra, spent almost the whole time talking to people she knew—it was like accompanying a visiting dignitary of some sort, or maybe a presidential hopeful—while he did the normal shopping. "
19 " Derek Rottweiler can’t go to the Natural History Museum at all anymore,” Matthew said, “because he took a slingshot into the butterfly conservatory "
20 " She is still typing away when Monique bangs into the apartment, slams her bag on the table and says, "If I were a cat, my ears would be straight back right now. "
― Katherine Heiny
