Jennifer DuBois Quotes

The city had seemed grand to him once ... it had once had a certain clarity. When you're young you think it's the clarity that's intoxicating; later you realize you were only ever drunk on your own vision.

Sending them was like sending a probe to Mars - he thought of its insect legs folding up into a squat, its motorized head casting this way and that. You could program it to do what you wanted, but it was no replacement for going there yourself and flinging your fingers into the red sand.

Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always.

Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldn't know.

We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose.

There wasn't a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our formers selves had ever done.

There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought
you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.

But it was one thing to know that your privilege was unearned; it was another thing entirely to feel that your sadness was, too - to have to be so pitifully glad, so pitifully sorry, for the modest perks of a dull and diligent middle-class life (TV, and Target candles, and a trip to Six Flags every year).

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

Do you ever feel that way, though?" "What way?" "Like you could go back to some time that's passed? Like you catch yourself thinking, why don't I go there anymore, and why don't I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it's because that life is gone? And that you can't?

It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.

I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies.

This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.

She never had to learn to live in a world that didn't necessarily want to go easy on her.

That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports).

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.

But all that talk. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn't know any better, and he was filled the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love.

I yawned, which is my cover for everything.

One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new.

Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.'
'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.'
So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments
chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.

When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been.