“The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”
“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions”
“Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes and bone density? ”
“Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona".”
“I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.”
“I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.”
“I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.”
“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”
“I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.”
“If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”
“Fucking bastards are simple by nature.”
“Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.”
“Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.”
“Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.”
“All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.”
“The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”
“I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.”
“It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.”
“I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I”
“So much in life is about almosts, not quites.”
“There are secret rooms inside us,” I had said to my therapist.
“A relatively benign construct,” he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.”
“Per i prossimo dieci anni la tua vita sarà orribile, avrai grandi problemi e niente ti andrà bene", dice l'indovino. "E poi?", chiede ansioso il cliente. "Poi? Poi ci farai l'abitudine!”
“Coffee, if not strong enough to wake a man from a coma, is not truly coffee.”
“Someday you’re going to wake up and leave your house, Magnet, and you’re going to discover the world. Someday you’re going to see the whole wide world, Maggie May, and on that day, when you step outside and breathe in your first breath, I want you to find me. No matter what, find me, because I’m going to be the one to show it to you. I’m going to help you cross things off your to-do list. I’m gonna show you the whole wide world. Just”
“Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.”
“Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?”
“Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…”
The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn.
“…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…”
He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?”
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