Fates And Furies Quotes
"The world is precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!"
"A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full."
"He loved her first for the stun of her across this thump and dance."
"Love that had begun so powerfully in the body had spread luxuriantly into everything."
"It’s not true that he had no standards, it’s simply that he saw the stun in every woman."
"If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated."
"This splendid everything was what he was screwing now."
"He felt the drama of the scene. Also, how many people were watching them, how beautiful he and Mathilde looked together."
"His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps."
"There was not not a kind of wallowing joy in this."
"You’re desperate for the love of strangers. To be seen."
"There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time."
"Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans."
"All this time and he’d been carrying around his ugliness as confidently as if it were beauty."
"The buried awareness of how completely her hands reached into his work; don’t look, Lotto. It’d be like looking at the sun."
"Who cares. She loved you. A good wife. Made your life beautiful, calm."
"Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions."
"I want to know everything about you. I want to meet your mother and aunt and sister immediately."
"But their first married consummation was over so fast. He laughed into her ear; she into his throat. It didn’t matter."
"She was no longer alone. She was crushed with gratitude."
"She laughed, a little, at her own earnestness. Oh, to have a mother, a family!"
"It’s true that even in Eden there were snakes."
"I take it from your comment that we have come to an accord. Excellent choice. You’re not stupid."
"Despite her fluency, she would mishear, misinterpret."
"The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another."
"I must confess that I did what any doting mother would do."
"Only a very dangerous or a very calculating person could do such a thing."
"All you have to do is abandon ship. Take your money and run."
"The loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors."
"I think I’m dying," he whispered. "You’re severely hungover. And we’re born dying," she said.
"We’re lonely down here," he said. "It’s true. But we’re not alone."
"You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country?"
"I always thought I’d deck you if I met you," Mathilde said.
"We are too proud to take handouts from anyone. Right?"
"I can’t believe that we’ve been married for two years and you’ve never met my mother. That’s insane."
"The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up."
"Perhaps the mother had watched her daughter fail and fail and didn’t move to help out of something unfathomable, something Mathilde struggled to understand, a thing that was like an immense kind of love."
"Mathilde’s heart was a bitter one, vengeful and quick."
"Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life."
"Empty theaters are more silent than other empty places. When theaters sleep, they dream of noise and light and motion."
"In the window the parakeet. Scrap of blue midday in the London dusk."
"Her life had paused; but in fast-forward the baby was born."
"All day at work she’d felt a ratcheting of anxiety, and when Lancelot wouldn’t answer her texts, when he didn’t come home, she went to find him."
"She hadn’t disguised herself, thinking there would have been no need; she was a healthy weight, her hair had returned, and it was a natural soft brown."
"She would have looked smiling down at him; she would have heard beyond 'Marry me' to the world that spun behind the words."
"A pity. Her hands warming on tea looked like clumps of knitting a child had felted in grubby palms."
"A regret. It was that, all her life, she had said 'no'. From the beginning, she had let so few people in."
"She would have laughed, touched his face for the first time. Felt his warmth in the palm of her hand. 'Yes,' she would have said. 'Sure'."