The Glass Hotel Quotes
"Look at me, learning about markets and the movements of money!"
"You must gird yourself against disappointment."
"I can't imagine what kind of person would write something like that."
"Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one."
"Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel."
"It’s wilderness up there, but let me tell you a secret about wilderness."
"There’s a sense of being outside of time and space."
"I don’t like to rat on my colleagues, but it seemed to me that the night houseman was behaving strangely."
"The lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world's just a little too much to bear."
"Success attracts a certain kind of attention."
"I’m paying a price for this life, but the price is reasonable."
"Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition."
"If you genuinely enjoy someone's company, if you enjoy your life with them and don't mind sleeping with them, isn't that enough?"
"I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down."
"The women were mostly much older than Vincent."
"Vincent moved through the room in a silver gown, smiling and telling people that she was delighted to meet them."
"Sometimes I don’t even see him anymore. I don’t want to think of myself as a person to whom other people are invisible, but there it is."
"It wasn’t the stuff that kept her in this strange new life, in the kingdom of money; it wasn’t the clothing and objects and handbags and shoes. It was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money."
"In the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking."
"There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened."
"Money is a game he knew how to play. No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom."
"I'd lived my life believing that I was looking for something. But I was actually looking for someone."
"In memory, the air-conditioning was so aggressive that she had trouble keeping warm, which was why she was always in the hot tub, whereas in the counterlife she’s not there at all."
"The trouble with land, it’s got too many people on it."
"The thing with Paul," her mother said, "is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something. You don’t. Nothing that happened to him is your fault."
"Do all of the other men have counterlives too? Alkaitis searches their faces for clues. He’s never been curious about other people before."
"Who doesn’t? In an alternate universe, I got away with it and I’ve got a sweet pad in Moscow," Churchwell says.
"There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen."
"In the kingdom of money it was important to be thin, but she would have run anyway."
"It’s possible to both know and not know something."
"She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love."
"I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above..."
"He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference."
"He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind."
"He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left."
"It wasn’t just those words, it was also the atmosphere, like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in…"
"The thought of stealing away in the darkness made him feel sleazy."
"Of course Jonathan Alkaitis would have one of Olivia Collins’s paintings in his pied-à-terre."
"It’s my life savings," a man was shouting, "you have to let me at least talk to someone, this is my entire life—"
"You’re under arrest," Detective Ihara said calmly.
"This isn’t a disaster," he whispered to himself.
"There’s something almost tedious about disaster."
"It’s possible to know and not know something at the same time."
"It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved."
"I’m not saying what I did was right but by any rational analysis I did some good in the world."
"There’s such pleasure in imagining their unlocked home succumbing to anarchy."
"Companies are like nation-states. They all have their own cultures."
"It is possible to disappear in the space between countries."
"You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?"
"I know what a slap sounds like. I turn around fast, and it’s obvious he just hit her."
"She looks at me and says, ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’"
"No one hits me. You think I’d let someone hit me?"
"You do that again, I’ll throw you overboard."
"It’s hearsay, my word against theirs, except I didn’t even see it."
"The way a bad message casts a shadow on the messenger."
"‘We actually have similar interests,’ Saparelli said."
"You stare at the road and the road stares back."
"‘We move through this world so lightly,’ said Marie."
"It can’t just be gone. It was my life savings."
"I’d like to tell you a story, which will end with a business proposition."
"On the appointed night he left for his dinner break and crept around to the side of the building."