The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.

We are all children until our fathers die.

You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy. It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.

You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.

You sense that he's dangerous but don't now why - and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.

It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.

Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.

I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.

You don't see him again. Sometimes you worry that he loved you better than any man ever has or will--even if it had nothing to do with you. Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into a cab, every runner along the river, every motorcycle coming and going.

He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.

Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, 'Just be yourself,' as though I had any idea who that might be.

In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said. I smiled. "What?" I said, "I was just thinking of your father.

I said, "It's not like that." I wanted to convince her. I said "We think alike." Oh, my dear," she said. "A man thinks with his dick.

Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.

You act like I just want to sleep with you... I want to EVERYTHING with you.

Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.

He gazed at me. "You've grown up honey." It felt good to hear it. I thought maybe he was right. Then it occurred to me that if I really had grown up I wouldn't want to be told.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.

But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.

You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.

He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.

You realize that if he doesn't know who you are, he won't be able to remember who you were.

Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching. I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window. Nobody was watching, except me.