Emily Fridlund Quotes

but I never said a thing about Patra and Paul, and I never told her what I really thought about Christian Science, which is that from what I know, from what little I know, it offers one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil. This

This was the best and worst thing about my wife: she felt sorry for me. When I put my work boots on the mantel or fell asleep on her side of the bed, she'd groan and clench her teeth. She'd kiss me, long and deep, a sigh of disappointment.

My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating. She could call you to her with one finger. She could do long division in her head. Another thing she could do really well was sob, and I envied her this, assuming it left nothing to eat at her inside.

Of course, things always seem more impressive when you're a little kid.

Her love for him has always been the underdog. She roots for it as if from a distance. She imagines what they must look like through the uncurtained window, the picture of tranquil domesticity they must now make. He smells like cilantro and beer, like curry and rain. And underneath that, he smells like himself, like nobody else, his body alarming because it is already so familiar.

I mean, you have to ask yourself, from the beginning, what do you think you know?" The

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters. *

So many people, even now, admire privation. They think it sharpens you, the way beauty does, into something that might hurt them. They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity you or fight. Like

and all he wanted was a half hour with his mother before bed. And all he had in the world was the ability to throw a tantrum. We

Nothing is something after all. There's math that proves this, of course, but also observations. I know it seems like math and observations are opposites.

By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that's what you wanted - pretenders who didn't know they were pretending at all.

I've found that some people who've done something bad will just go ahead and condemn everyone else around
them to avoid feeling shitty themselves. As if that even works. Other types of people, and I'm not saying you're
this, necessarily, but I'm just putting it out there, will defend people like me on principle because when their
turns come around, they want that so badly for themselves.

I didn't need to think of myself as a walleye drifting along in a current somewhere, just waiting for my hook. I was yearning for it. *

Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.

We need to know the truth of that, pray to understand that death is just the false belief that anything could ever end. There's no going anywhere for any of us, not in reality. There's only changing how you see things." I

This is how you keep a best friend: you talk out of guilt, you live in separate states. Again and again, you vow fidelity to her in fits of absurd hopefulness. It is the same as being in love.

Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it - the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn't get dragged back again. You wouldn't have to start over, and over.

He wore a candy-cane scarf and a red pom-pom hat. Every time the wind started up, his pom bounced on the air like a bobber.

Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things.

She looked at Paul with a face broken open, with a look of utter love and desolation, as if she'd given him everything in the ten minutes she'd known him, and he'd taken it, oh, he'd taken it anyhow, knowing just how much it cost. I

You can see eleven stars appear over the horizon if you don't look for more.

Maybe if I'd been someone else I'd see it differently. But isn't that the crux of the problem? Wouldn't we all act differently if we were someone else?

Heaven and hell are ways of thinking. Death is the false belief that anything could ever end.

It seemed unfair to me that people couldn't be something else just by working at it hard, by saying it over and over.