Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Quotes
"Life’s too short. You couldn’t get me to read that stuff for a million dollars."
"I must’ve thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me."
"You tell your folks I’m thinking about them, will you do that?"
"Nobody would know about it. But my father had known."
"It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble."
"Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s?"
"Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him."
"The danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own."
"Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting."
"He had to remind me of the story, published several years ago."
"I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character."
"Sometimes I think she’s putting it on. Like, she’ll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she’ll just say the same thing."
"She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes."
"I moved her down there so’s I could keep an eye on her."
"I felt overfull, not just of food but of everything that I had seen and sensed in the apartment."
"The crowded, old-fashioned furnishings. Bill’s silences."
"Alfrida’s love, stubborn as sludge, and inappropriate, and hopeless."
"I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh."
"She said you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were."
"The LakeShore Funeral Home was an extensive new building of golden brick."
"I have driven around in the hills northeast of Toronto."
"I had more acquaintance with blood and animal-killing than Mike did."
"I accepted readily, even devoutly, the roles that did not have to be explained or worked out between us."
"We were like sturdy and accustomed sweethearts, whose bond needs not much outward expression."
"I woke up every morning hungry for the sight of him."
"The game disintegrated, after a long while, in arguments and mass resurrections."
"I must have known that Mike would be leaving. Just as I knew that Ranger was old and that he would soon die."
"I did not become troublesome. After the first shock I did not let anybody see a thing."
"I worshipped, without any show of it, the back of his neck and the shape of his head."
"I have found the golf course—I think it the right one, though the ragged verges have been cleaned up."
"During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler."
"Do you think it would be fun—" Fiona shouted. "Do you think it would be fun if we got married?"
"I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time," she said. "It’ll be sort of like in a hotel."
"I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins."
"I don’t think it’s anything to worry about," she said. "I expect I’m just losing my mind."
"I’m sure I’ve just forgotten where I put it," Fiona said calmly, though clearly puzzled.
"That’s shocking," she said upon learning when they moved to their house.
"It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say."
"She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere."
"I thought they’d quit doing that," she said, referring to the marks left by her shoes.
"I was looking at the Help Wanteds. First, though, I want to do something with your hair."
"In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it."
"If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job."
"You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you?"
"The holiday season had so many emotional pitfalls."
"So if she could remember that so vividly and correctly, could there really be so much the matter with her?"
"We find that if they’re left on their own they usually end up happy as clams."
"I wouldn’t laugh," he said to Grant, who did not think he had been laughing."
"Old women going after the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess."
"Nature doesn’t fool around just being decorative."