The Interestings Quotes
"Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit."
"Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment."
"Then it wouldn’t be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention."
"The reality is really different from the fantasy."
"Life is full of them," Ash said. "I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange."
"They were all quiet for a moment; it was perplexing to know what to do when atrocity suddenly came up against irony."
"We should all try to do whatever we want in life. I mean, what is the point otherwise?"
"The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer."
"Despite my wisdom by now, I am small-minded and predictable."
"You know that I love them, right? I need to make sure you know this."
"Do you remember how much worse I used to be?"
"The whole place fibrillated with good work and industry."
"This concentrated and renewed burst of ancient Ash-and-Ethan envy had turned Jules into someone shameful."
"There wasn’t some woman with a curved back kneeling on the floor cleaning these tiles each week."
"Sometimes I just need to cry. No, he’s listening to a CD. He’s got headphones on. He’s completely oblivious. I wish I was too."
"Because you can remind her that, you know, we’ve always gotten through everything. That’s what we’ve always done."
"Depression wasn’t anything that she and her friends ever thought about."
"The near-squalor of Jules’s one room on Horatio Street wasn’t a source of shame to her."
"It’s just a thing where you try to think about what’s realistic in your reaction and what’s not."
"They all hated Ronald Reagan with a uniform loathing."
"Accidents always seemed to take place "outside" of places you’d heard of, never directly in them."
"Everyone who lived on the Upper West Side then told stories of having been mugged or nearly mugged at least once."
"After Robert’s sudden emotional, frightened story about Trey Speidell, and the ensuing gloom at the table, Isadora dominated the night."
"Your skinny androgyne of a haircutter hardly even looked at you as he or she cut your hair."
"After all the conversations they’d had. All the hummus they’d eaten."
"Because I am a piece of toast, you can bite me, you can break me, you can butter me, you can take me."
"I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even."
"My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on."
"You’re just so much yourself. You’re not all neurotic like some girls—watching what they eat all the time, or pretending to be a little less smart than a boy."
"I’m really not great. I have no greatness in me."
"I mean I haven’t done anything, as in have experience. Life experience."
"We need women who look like you and Gloria Steinem. We can’t just have those dumpy bull dykes representing the cause."
"I want to be loved by someone who was not Ethan Figman."
"It wasn’t supposed to go like this with Cathy."
"You don’t know that. Consider his absence a kind of reflective vacation."
"Sometimes I think the male of our species is unknowable."
"The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person."
"I just want everything to be okay. I want to get past this bad part of our lives."
"Life at the Wolf household remained in trauma mode."
"Goodman wasn’t even here. Noodge was our dog, his and mine."
"Life didn’t always work out, but we’ll work it out, we’ll smooth it over."
"I constantly think about your brother, and wonder where the fuck he is right now," he said. "I mean, right this minute, where is Goodman? What's he doing? Is he eating dinner? Lunch? Breakfast? Is he taking a crap? Is he working in a falafel joint?"
"I’m aware that New York is a toilet bowl—but an expensive porcelain one," he said.
"It's just that it was all left unresolved," he said.
"Wouldn't you give anything to know where he is? To know that he's okay?"
"Don't you wonder?" he asked. "Of course you do."
"Imagine just disappearing one day and then never being seen again. Who does that? What kind of person puts their family and friends through that?"
"Sometimes I think that maybe he was much more fucked up than we thought. That he was even, like, a sociopath."
"Isn’t knowing always better than not knowing? I mean, generally in life?"
"It’s a strange subject," Ash said in a tight voice that he’d only very rarely heard from her, and disliked.
"I know that. You just get so strange about it," said Ethan.
"But the friendship was untouchable, uncorrodible; it was the centerpiece of the two marriages, and all four of them knew it."
"None of them were supposed to be powerful; power wasn’t anything they’d ever aspired to."
"All around them, making money, and wanting to make money, had grown infinitely more reputable."
"These days, if you were a starving artist, you were thought of as failed."
"He wore Felix the Cat and Gepetto T-shirts and still drew in little spiral notebooks."
"We can never tell them we went out and looked at the list."
"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh my, friends—It gives a lovely light!"
"But money as an end product, money as a creation, seemed disgusting to Jules."
"It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand."
"Leave everything to Ash and Ethan, for they deserve it. Just give me what we had, it’s enough now."
"The sight of them was overwhelming to Jules, and she had to look hard, then finally look away."
"You may not feel you should take any help, but we need to give it."
"But we also have resources that most people don’t have."
"Everyone else was banished, and the private scene was beginning."
"They were able to live their lives, sometimes to a fairly full extent, but they never felt good."
"Just give out the licenses to places that check out and seem decent, you know?"
"Things happen along the supply chain that you have no control over."
"Run your own company with the ethical code you were raised with."
"What a lame excuse that was; no one at this resort had anywhere they had to go."
"He was upset by the man’s self-assured words."
"Everyone considered Ethan a good person—‘moral,’ Ash always said, but they had no idea."
"You couldn’t police the world, but you told yourself you were doing the best you could."
"It made Ethan seriously uneasy whenever he thought about what went on there."
"Maybe the best you can ever do is cause less harm."
"He felt perverse. He knew his detachment hadn’t come about because he needed Mo to perform."
"He was unable to open his own heart to his son."
"Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep."
"Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time," Jules said. "But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast."
"You won’t feel like a freak, if you try batik . . . You can get your ass goin’ with a little glassblowin’ . . ."
"I’m running on at the mouth because I want Jules to know she can’t send me home. The nurse doesn’t know shit about calorie consumption. I know a lot more than her."
"If you can’t have a good relationship with somebody, then you should at least have a good relationship with your work. Your work should feel like . . . an incredible person lying next to you in bed."
"He stole my music from me, Ethan. He stole it; he took it away."