“We love films because they makes us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into the eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken.”
“Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we're really saying is I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?”
“The best things aren't perfectly constructed. They aren't illusions. they aren't larger than life. They are life.”
“There’s still this thing that happens after you break up with
someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do
is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a
room with her again it’s as if you’re a different person. Maybe
your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is
louder. You’re wearing perfume she’s never smelled before and
you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don’t even
have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to
say Look at who I am without you.”
“When you love someone, you are sure. You don’t need time to decide. You don’t say stop and start over and over, like you’re playing some kind of sport. You know the immensity of what you have and you protect it.”
“What's the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?" I say. "What if the moment escapes you in a split second when your focus was elsewhere?”
“I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders... I fall in love too easily... I have fierce spells of self-doubt.”
“We love films because they make us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken. Remember about death and suffering and the complexities of living. Remember what it is like to love someone. Remember how it is to be loved. Remember what you feel in this moment. Remember this. Remember this.”
“They weren't cheap and I was almost broke. It was a choice between dinner and flowers and I chose flowers because it was a dark time in my life and my room was hideous and my heart was broken and I needed something beautiful.”
“I know," I say. "It sucks. Let's go get tacos and sit on the beach.”
“Dignity is overrated. You know what trumps dignity? Kissing.”
“She was never something waiting to be solved. All she is - all she's ever been - is a person trying to live a life.”
“There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes.”
“It sucks to lose your best friend, even if only to distance. Even when it isn't really losing her at all.”
“There are still Ava Maddoxes to find and sets to create and girls to kiss and colleges to attend. It's possible that someday I will hear a patsy Cline song and the heartbreak will barely register. It will be some distant, buried feeling. I won't remember how much it once hurt.”
“This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on their work.”
“I can't think of enough expletives to perfectly capture this moment.”
“There's nothing stupid about wanting to be loved. Believe me.”
“There's something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They're all about the moment when a girl is no longer who she once was”
“I think that sometimes people want something so much that they manifest it. Or at least they try to.”
“There's still this thing that happens after you break up with someone. It barely takes anytime to work. All you have to do is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a room with her again it's as if you're a different person.”
“It's the opposite of the collapse of the fantasy.
It's what happens when the illusion pales in comparison to the truth. I'm seeing her for the first time. Not Ava Garden Wilder, the rags-to-riches granddaughter of Clyde Jones. Not a tragic, romantic heroine.
Just Ava.
And I am utterly in love.”
“Is it possible to get over a voice like this? Someday, I'd like to be able to hear her speak a sentence on the phone with out it making me want to hang up, get in my car, and drive as many miles as it takes to kiss her.”
“As much as I had wanted a love story out of a movie, I know now that movies can only hope to to capture this kind of love.”
“Don't you want to kiss me?' she asks.
She smiles just a little, a hopeful, sweet smile, but buried in it is that confidence that slays me.”
“Yearning is a red-haired girl sitting on the hood of her silver sedan, reading about Marilyn Monroe. A cherry orchard at night, houselights in the distance. It's the painstaking neatness of a paint-by-number sunset, a yellowed letter held between graceful fingers, a cautious step into the sun-filled lobby of a famous hotel.
It's the way I feel every time I think about Ava.”
“A terrible day," Frank echoes.
"Yes," Edie says, her gaze never leaving Ava's face. "But look. You grew up anyway.”
“There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes. And none are skipped over and they all lead to the next.”
“It's an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it's broken. The kind that feels impossible to shrug off or tuck away. But there is another feeling, too, surfacing, and soon I discover that it's the kind that makes the heartbreak almost something to savor because it is so simple and true.”
“What’s the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?” I say. “What if the moment escapes you in the split second when your focus was elsewhere?”
“perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps”
“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.”
“Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart," he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files.
"Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness and content feels the necessity of loving. Without it, life is unfinished...”
“You feel even more naked and alone, he said silently, when you reveal yourself, a gratuitous act, for the strength and comfort you look for, any of those last illusions of consolations, can finally be only within you.”
“A barren woman was always tragic, she thought despairingly, but at least her tragedy belonged to herself and her husband alone. When a queen was barren, the tragedy belonged to a nation.”
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