We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality.
It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.
It must be tough, I said sincerely. Having no clear line between your reality and your bullshit. There’s a line, Jack said. It just moves around a lot.
Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a b...
Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.P.15
Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face an...
Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it.
A problem is something to solve, Phillip says. If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.
The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shel...
Here's the thing. I don't think you're in love with her, not all the way. If you were, I think you would seem more certain about it. More jazzed. You wouldn't hug me the way we hug, and say the things...
Even when someone is deserving of your anger, they’re still deserving of compassion. It’s hard to pull off, believe me—no one knows that more than me. And if you’re only going to pull it off a handful...
[T]here are some people out there who don't wait for what comes next. They decide what should come next and they go and make it happen.
You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them...
The self-help books and websites haven’t come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy.
Please, she says. Tell me what you’re thinking. It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for...
Once, when I was old enough to ponder these things and young enough to think there might be credible answers, I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, Do you believe in God? Not really, he sa...
It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who...
It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.
If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it's because that's how we were raised.