The Next Best Thing Quotes
"I had told myself to expect bad news; told myself, a thousand times, that the numbers were not in my favor."
"I pored over books for expectant parents to give my characters just the right names, and spent days in the kitchens of local restaurants so I could nail the details of my heroine’s job."
"Grandma paused and rested her hand on the man’s forearm. She tilted her face up toward his, batted her eyelashes, and gave him her gentle smile."
"You have to respect them," she said, nibbling at the strawberry that sat on the side of the dessert plate. "Finding a way to get paid for sleeping. That’s initiative."
"My love affair with television began when I was eight years old. It started—as so many things do—with The Golden Girls."
"If I couldn’t be pretty, in the manner of girls, I’d decided I could be brave, like a boy or a superhero, impressing strangers not with my beauty but by how much I could endure."
"What do you love?" she would ask, instead of What do you need?
"Write it down," she would tell me. "Tell me a story."
"I’d spend my summer on the fourth floor, in the bed by the window in a room for two, where a bulky air conditioner wheezed and rattled day and night."
"In those days, the television sets that patients could rent were boxy, outdated models that were bolted to the ceiling and got three channels."
"It's not about art, or drama, or telling the best stories, or trying to make the world a better place. It's just selling stuff. Selling airtime to the advertisers. Selling stories to the viewers. Like that."
"Life is hard. But you can't just lie there and let it kick you. Get up. Get another job. Find another guy. Go fishing."
"Razors pain you. Rivers are damp. Acids stain you. And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful. Nooses give. Gas smells awful. You might as well live."
"When you looked like I did, people went out of their way to not see you, to act as if you weren’t there."
"But now everything’s fine, and I’m ready to work again."
"I made a decent amount of money and even a few friends, and learned that first impressions, and beauty, could be deceiving."
"The world delighted Big Dave, and why shouldn’t it?"
"I'd find a way to use my voice, funny-mean and observant, to earn my keep, to make my name, to carve out a place in the world."
"I'm the only one who ever uses the pool. It feels wasteful."
"You're giving up on Miami after four hours and one job interview? I didn't raise you any better than that?"
"The ability to kill in an audition didn't necessarily mean that an actress could do the same thing on show night."
"I’ll never be a size zero, but as long as I’m happy and healthy, that’s fine."
"She was the total package, pretty but relatable, a girl who could handle jokes and drama with equal skill."
"My right arm and shoulder were puckered and pitted with scars that made it look as if something had been chewing on me."
"I wondered who they belonged to, who they’d been bought for."
"You wipe that poor-me look off your face, and you think about who you are and what you’ve got, and you get back out there and you use it."
"The doctors had spent most of their time and attention on my face, reasoning, correctly, that clothing would cover the worst of the damage most of the time."
"One more time, less vaudeville. More nuance."
"Did Barbra Streisand give up when they told her, after Funny Lady, that she needed a nose job if she wanted to be a star? No, they did not."
"I might be back, but I won't be crawling. And I won't be coming back to you."
"I would kill my own mother for a goddamn cheeseburger."
"Sometimes clichés are clichés because they're true."
"Not every girl dreams of Prince Charming riding up in a wheelchair instead of a white horse. I get it."
"It’s like, I worked so hard... not to be that girl anymore."
"Why do we suffer? What does it mean? What is it for?"
"If it hadn't been for the accident... I'd be another miserable lawyer."
"You look beautiful. A million girls in America would kill to look the way you do."
"As much as I thought that Cady had every advantage over me, she was trapped, too. Time was her enemy in a way it would never be mine."
"In this life you didn’t get 'perfect.' And barring perfection, what I had was, to coin a phrase, the next best thing."
"Love. Success. Enough money to throw a party like this and send my grandmother and Maurice on a ten-day honeymoon in Hawaii."
"The opposite of love was not hatred but indifference."
"I’m good. I’ll miss her . . . I didn’t want to say more, didn’t want to tell him how empty my apartment and my life would feel without her."
"Maybe none of it would last—in the back of my mind, I could hear Dave saying drily, You don’t get perfect—but I was going to grab this happiness and hold it as tightly as I could."
"For the next little while, I had everything I wanted, right in this bed."
"I had lived with the sound of a clock in my ears, ticking, louder and louder, its sound underlining everything I did."
"If I had a chance to do exactly the show I wanted? If I had a guarantee that I could cast whoever I wanted, that I’d have final cut? Are you kidding?"
"It was what I’d expected, no more and no less. "I should call my lawyer.""
"The truth was, in this cutthroat climate, with cable channels and on-demand playback and entertainment available on every iPad and cell phone, no network was willing to wait."