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1 " When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can't give love anymore. She wouldn't be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore. "
― Lily King , Five Tuesdays in Winter
2 " I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them. "
3 " She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she’d give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in. "
4 " Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness. "
5 " Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss. "
6 " She seemed amused, entirely uninterested in changing him. He knew it was like that at first with anyone. He also knew it might mean that she didn’t care about him at all. "
7 " The visit has unveiled the mystery of this man’s devastating ambivalence years ago, but she could have done without his but-for-the-grace-of-God relief as he hugged her goodbye. "
8 " hair "
9 " It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while shifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective. "
10 " A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors.Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books. "
11 " He'd always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he'd never been anything but this one self. "
12 " Love, he thought. It would come out soon enough. Words and feelings were all churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn't try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest. "
13 " I was feeling what I should be feeling, as if for once all the sharp awkward fragments of my life suddenly fell into their proper slots. "
