“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”
“Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.”
“He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.”
“Doesn´t she have diarrhea of the mouth?”
“Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.”
“The cold in her makes cold in me.”
“I hid my wounds because I was ashamed...but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced..”
“Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.”
“...there is a piece of me missing so big that the pain doubles me over, clawing at my gut...”
“She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can't blame her.”
“There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.”
“...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.”
“Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning...”
“stayed because I thought things would get better, or at least not worse.”
“church people had a strange way about them. They smiled too much, were quick to compliment and support, but behind the stretched lips and soft words was a judgment. No one was ever good enough—at least not until they were dead. The dead were exemplary. Saldur”
“You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. Or,”
“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”
“You need to understand something," she said intently. "Charles is my husband. You can't have him. Mine. Not yours. There are lots of nice, unattachment men out there, I'm sure. Pick one of them and you might live longer." Then her body relaxed and her voice regained its usual cheeriness. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Newman.”
“You're glowering again," Abigail whispered, stepping to his side and giving him a sharp rap with the fan she was clutching.
"Can you blame me?"
Abigail shot a look to Harriet who was having her hand accosted by an earnest young gentleman by the name of Mr. Richmond Sprout. "Not int he least, dear, but you really should try to control that temper of yours. The last thing we need this evening is for you to punch someone."
"That thought never entered my head."
"Of course it did, but I find it rather sweet.”
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