Luster Quotes
"Of course I worry about IT remoting into my computer, or my internet history warranting yet another disciplinary meeting with HR. But the risk. The thrill of a third pair of unseen eyes."
"Otherwise, I have not had much success with men. This is not a statement of self-pity. This is just a statement of the facts."
"I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing."
"There are people who count on him, and sometimes they need him urgently."
"I look into the mirror and practice my smile, because they moved me to a desk where my manager can see my face."
"I am the managing editorial coordinator for our children’s imprint, meaning I occasionally tell the editorial assistants to fact-check how guppies digest food."
"But everything is different IRL. For one thing, I am not as quick on my feet."
"I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house."
"I am not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen."
"But now I am seven years removed and there are some days I don’t even think about her."
"I listen to a newly pregnant publicity assistant retch (lately always between 9:03 and 9:15) in one of the stalls, and I firm up my ponytail."
"Details so minute as to be absurd, an em dash, the romanization of a quotation mark, a last-minute change in the acknowledgments from I would like to thank my wife to I would like to thank my dog, but, and maybe this is surprising, I am good at all of this."
"I eavesdrop on them, which in an open plan is not eavesdropping so much as accepting your silent role in everyone’s conversation."
"Early August is generally when employee evaluations start, and I have prepared a diplomatic way to say that I loathe everyone here."
"Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone."
"Technically, I’m not allowed to transport anything that qualifies as a drug, but there are prep school kids who need bubble tea and Marlboros."
"Everyone is excited to see me, and I am sort of excited to see them, the habitual Bensonhurst McFlurries, the Gen X brownstoners who, for some reason, use the app to order pizza."
"Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all."
"I have said goodbye enough times to know that departure has a way of gilding what are, at best, slow quotidian deaths, but still each time I think of everything I will lose."
"But the impulse to cry has vanished. I imagine the high traffic I will meet on my way back and try to get the tears out while I have the privacy, but nothing happens."
"I have a dream about the bones in my skull liquefying, and when I wake up and see my laundry basket, something about the inevitability of dirty clothes, of the sebum and discharge, of a finite number of quarters, fills me with panic."
"Her focus is so intense it is almost embarrassing to watch."
"Your story... it's about the scarcity of purity."
"Sometimes we all go together. It’s terrible."
"The first time I lost my hair, I was ten and no one was home."
"There was an explosion at the crematorium. Someone forgot to take the pacemaker out."
"He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him."
"He became a man who always had girlfriends but didn’t much like them."
"I have never been so tired. I have never been so prolific."
"Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove, and what better way to prove yourself than through a child."
"I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers."
"Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, chocolate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all excused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt."
"I think about our child again, and this time a slew of predispositions undermine that gorgeous Punnett square."
"It felt like a necessary preamble, routine, like putting on a sock before a shoe."
"The truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die."
"Sometimes, I hoped something bad might happen to you. Isn’t that monstrous?"
"A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t."
"It is an embarrassing declaration, even as the room is going dark, but when I wake up and they provide me with a diaper, the declaration feels no different from a theoretical child, a thing I’ve cultivated mostly in my mind, cautiously, desperately."
"I did like him, once. When we were theoretical. When we were at the top of the coaster and the wind was in his hair."