Dream Girl Quotes
"Is it the medication? It must be the medication."
"The modern world is forever flummoxing Gerry."
"Time passes on its own. It doesn’t need my help."
"The inmates are running the assisted-living facility."
"For all he knows, she has written his credit card information down somewhere and still uses it for purchases."
"He had felt very heroic next to her, a man capable of caring for a sought-after woman, and not just financially."
"Gerry used to like that. He had felt very heroic next to her, a man capable of caring for a sought-after woman, and not just financially."
"She was kind enough to come and check on me."
"If Thiru has six Gerrys, he basically has Gerry’s income, no?"
"His hope is that she will become fixated on Thiru, with his lovely suits and even lovelier manners."
"Gerry has a hard time figuring out how much money others have because he has always lived quite modestly, relative to the money he earned after Dream Girl."
"Aileen sits nearby, in a low-slung easy chair, her plain face big and bright as a full moon thanks to the light from her tablet."
"I’ll take two pills," he says, "and call you in the morning."
"It’s important, however, that his upper body not lose muscle tone while he’s lying here."
"It’s exhausting, meaning well in a world that assumes you’re a pig because of the body you’re born into."
"His mother wasn’t losing her mind. She was just making up a story that made her feel better, that restored the self-respect taken from her long ago."
"Would it matter if the Olympic swimmer actually occupied his expensive apartment?"
"A static, wallpaper kind of content, determined to be inoffensive at all costs."
"It’s cumulative. If you don’t take both now, you’ll feel it by morning."
"Everything is contracted out now and the world is poorer for it."
"You cannot afford to screw up," his mother said. "Do you understand that? Those other boys have parents, fathers, who can get them out of trouble. They have money. All you have is a mother who works as the office manager for a pediatrician."
"Apply yourself and maybe one day you can buy yourself a Mercedes. If you care about such silly, empty things. But you’ll have to work, and work hard, for any money you get. That’s how life is going to be for you. It’s not fair and it’s not right. But it’s not fair to me, either, and you don’t hear me complaining."
"Just be a good man, Gerry. That’s all I’m asking. Be a good man."
"Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death."
"Life is a buffet; take what you want, skip what you don’t, stick your head under the sneeze guard if necessary."
"You can’t be successful at anything if you don’t show up."
"It’s funny to you, that I think I’m happy? A life like mine, it can’t be someone’s dream? I’m not saying it’s my first dream. I mean, when you’re a kid, everybody wants to be something they’re never going to be, right? A ballet dancer, a fireman?"
"Everyone's unhappy if they have even a sliver of intelligence. Who can be happy in this world?"
"Who wants to answer such a question? It’s why he has avoided therapy all these years."
"He prefers to say he understood the present’s subtext. He saw the currents, what was going on underneath."
"He had hoped for either an outstanding adaptation or a total botch that would lead to impassioned tributes to the source material."
"He feels warm this morning and, strangely, loved, although the one person who loved him reliably is gone."
"By the time Victoria returns on Monday, it feels as if the world has righted itself."
"Margot is the type of person who figures out what will hurt a person the most and then uses that information to her advantage."
"Someone should benefit from my, um, temporary insanity."
"I’m not a professor, merely a writer. MFA, no Ph.D."
"With hard work, disciplined habits, and an ambitious reading life, yes."
"But she didn’t try to move from the bed and her back arched, her body responding to his touch."
"GERRY’S PHYSICAL CONDITION is improving, day by day, and he couldn’t feel worse."
"There’s Shakespeare, of course. No one argues against Shakespeare."
"Money or love. Isn't that the reason for most things people do? We can live without one, but not without both."
"First do no harm, Aileen. That's for doctors, but nurses should strive for it, too."
"The whole comprises the parts. Not 'comprised of.'"
"Do I need to define 'meme' for you, or this one in particular?"
"I can get us out of this—and make sure it never happens again."
"Please hold your comments until I finish reading."
"It’s a choice. I’m trying to make a point, that it’s a very thin line between fiction and real life, that all fiction is appropriated from the lives of others, so it’s better to be transparent about it."
"Life is unfair, Leenie. If you haven’t figured that out when you’re almost thirty years old, that’s a problem."
"I’m not dead yet! I don’t want to go on the cart."
"Of all the women in his life, he misses Lucy the most."
"Gerry, at sixty-one, is desirable because of what he’s accomplished."
"You had loomed so large in my life, ever since I was a teenager. I read everything you wrote."
"The best way not to become one’s father is to never be a father at all."
"Everything is in the before moment. That’s where life is richest, in that moment of possibility and anticipation."
"There is no democracy in sexual attraction and there is not, in his estimation, a lid for every pot."