Alternate Side Quotes
"It's a dead-end block," repeated Nora, for what felt like the thousandth time.
"Listening to you people," said Jenny, "marriage sounds sort of like the den."
"Did everyone miss the entire point of what I said?" Jenny asked.
"It reminded her of her youth, when she’d first arrived in a nastier, scarier, dirtier New York City."
"For Nora, Ricky was one of the two linchpins of a daily existence."
"Their marriage had become like the AA prayer: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.'"
"Marriage vows, Nora had long felt, constituted a loyalty oath."
"All jobs sound silly unless you’re a pediatric oncologist, or a plumber."
"You couldn’t mention the word Harvard around Charity because Rachel had been denied admission."
"Some things are just believing," Charity had said, lifting her chin. "Some things just the truth."
"Children be needing the Lord in their lives," Charity said.
"You want them to be proud of you for actually doing something to be proud of."
"The city had become like that edgy girl in college, all wild hacked hair and leather."
"The identities of everyone they knew were illusory: they considered themselves New Yorkers but all of them were from someplace else."
"The price they had paid for prosperity was amnesia. They’d forgotten who they once had been."
"She still liked the sound of someone ranting on the street."
"The city was primal and chemical. There was a great immutability to the Hudson River."
"That towel is just a towel, ordinary, humdrum, but at that one moment it feels like fur, better than fur, like safety, care, the right thing."
"He’s an Australian cattle dog," Nora said. "And you’re Nora Nolan," he said. "From the jewelry museum."
"You are the only person who has been sensitive enough not to ask me a million questions," Sherry said when Nora saw her at the corner three days later.
"We should get a new sofa. We should replace the garbage cans."
"Every party needs one crashing boor," she said. "And Betsy is lovely."
"You couldn’t replace this sort of house. People tried: old brick from a magical place somewhere in central Pennsylvania, oak flooring salvaged by the Amish, new cornices designed to look like old, mantels taken from other houses. Somehow you could always tell."
"With a house as old as theirs in a city as fluid as New York, the idea that it belonged to you was relative."
"'With houses this old, every single one has had someone die in it,' Alma Fenstermacher said."
"'Did you ever consider canceling?' Nora asked, choosing a cookie."
"‘God, you’re in a great mood,’ Suzanne said."
"‘The good news is that whoever was putting dog poop on my stoop has stopped,’ Nora said."
"‘I always wondered what you did with all the leftovers,’ Nora said."
"‘I hate February,’ Nora said to Charlie at breakfast."
"‘Everyone hates February,’ she said, snapping a breadstick."
"‘The really good news,’ Nora said, ‘is that my assistant quit.’"
"‘How did you wind up doing this in the first place?’ ‘Ah, you know—like most things, it was a confluence of events,’ he said."
"'It’s only humiliating if I feel humiliated, and I don’t,' he said."
"What, because you’re homeless you have to be stupid?"
"Definitely. Nice, smart, not clingy, not crazy."
"It’s not for you people, it’s for the people who take advantage—you know what I mean?"
"But afterward George had sent out one of his notices: Only homeowners are permitted to attend the barbecue."
"The neighborhood children jumped around in one of those bouncy tents that someone had rented."
"I hear they will actually sometimes roast an entire pig."
"I’m a big fan of the feral cat, but you can’t convince New Yorkers on that."
"They are no respecters of class, believe me."
"My mom says Mr. Fisk needs to learn to get his temper under control."
"French-press coffee and a vegetable omelet on a tray with butter in little curls."
"Sometimes she had a momentary fantasy of never checking out."
"It’s true. This winter we had two inches one day, and they had no clue how to handle it."
"One minute you were two people who loved each other despite your differences."
"You could argue they’d lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage."
"Sometimes she thought that was an aberration. The truth was that some of their marriages were like balloons: a few went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no lift to it anymore."
"People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all."
"You had to really, really, really like being with someone."
"The price so many of them had paid for prosperity was amnesia."
"Reinvention, newness was all, all built on the sturdy back of what was past."
"Somewhere in the bake shop (gluten-free) was a flyer for the old pizza parlor, and the shoe repair place that was there before that, and the kosher deli, and so on and so forth, down to the rocky remainders of the creek that once flowed through midtown before there was a midtown, before there was an America, that lay now beneath concrete and tar and earth."
"The great city now, today, glittery new, just made, a monumental illusion."