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1 " Buck up. Fake it till you feel it. The show must go on. This was the way they did things - These people in the world she'd grown up in. "
― , Laura & Emma
2 " The disparity of their desserts was beyond anything Emma could have imagined. Blinking back tears, she put a raisin in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed—repeating the process until the gross, sticky box was empty, her disgust rendered bearable by the feeling that struck in situations of unfairness: a feeling that her life was a movie and the audience was God, and a faith in knowing her grace and fortitude in this moment would not go unnoticed. "
3 " Laura felt like they were characters in a play about WASPs—a satirical production that yielded no new insights, just desiccated clichés. She imagined an Upper West Side Jewish audience getting bored and leaving before intermission. "
4 " They saw her and Emma as incomplete, stray people, a free-floating fragment; the goal was to make them whole and anyone, anyone, anyone would be better than no one. "
5 " One of the more exhausting aspects of getting older was having to act like an adult. Pretending to like people you couldn’t stand, speaking for the sake of filling a silence, smiling when you felt like crying. "
6 " It was as though a curtain had been pulled back and something terribly ugly had been revealed and nothing would ever feel the same. They could never go back to how it was, to how life was supposed to be, because it had never really been that way. Everything up to that point had been a game of make believe. "
7 " For the rest of the day she carried it around. It felt like a huge secret, like she’d just found out she’d won an award and couldn’t tell anyone. But she didn’t care, because there was no vanity in goodness. "
8 " People who thought New Yorkers were cold and uncaring didn’t understand that in a city like this, one’s physical proximity to strangers necessitated a respect of their psychological privacy. "
9 " If a life is measured by the affection one earned, where would that leave her? "
