Melissa Bank Quotes

While home is the place where you can relax and be yourself, this doesn't mean that you can take advantage of the love and affection other members of your family have for you.

Good'?" my aunt said. "Children are good. Dogs are good. This is theater, Jane.

He didn't remember because he'd seen thousands of little fish hundreds of times, and because it didn't mean to him what it had to me.

You try to plan your life, but that's not how it works.

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.

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.

He tells me that he knows Max from freshman year - roughly twenty years - and I remember that a huge number of Oberlin friends are here and ask what bonds them all for life.
He says "No one else will be friends with us.

I remembered my father's speech about what Jack was capable of and wasn't; he'd said, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW MUCH JACK LOVES YOU. I thought about all the girls he'd stopped loving; it was like he had a timer, and at a certain point it buzzed.

You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had.
I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson.
"Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.

I tried to go back and talk about what I did know. I told her about one girl he'd brought home from Cornell; I'd asked if she was his girlfriend, and he's said, When you define something, you limit it.

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.

Later, lying in bed, I wonder if Dena knows about her father. I decide that she probably does, and I imagine how I would feel if I knew that my father was unfaithful to my mother.
Then I remember Richard, and I think that marriage might not mean much to Dena. I can't really blame her: She learned about marriage from her parents, just as I did from mine. For all I know, sleeping with Richard is just Dena's way of trying not to be her mother.

He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything.
After he's gone, I think, Happy birthday to me.
Jack says, 'That was the guy?'
'That was him.'
Jake shakes his head.
'What?'
'He's not for you,' he says.
I say, 'How do you know?' but what I mean is, How do you know?
'He's like Ashley Wilkes,' he says. 'Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.'
Again, I ask my benignly inflected, 'How do you know?'
'How do I know?' he says, tackling me into a bear hug. 'How do I know? I know, that's how I know.

Jack knew how to make women fall in love with him, but that didn't exactly qualify him as a guidance counselor.

You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.

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

You don't need a reason to forgive ... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.

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

As ever, Sue was on the phone, and I could tell by her posture - she was half laying on the desk - that she was crying. I knew this was no distress but joy: She always cried when her boyfriend admitted that he was a complete idiot.

Archie asked if I'd told my parents about him, and I said I hadn't. "How much longer are you going to keep me in the closet?" he said. "It's dark in here. And I keep stepping on your shoes.

With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.

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.

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.

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

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

It was the opposite of love, and yet it wasn't love I was opposed to but the murmurs that said, This is your chance, which seemed less like the promise of a door opening than the threat of one sealing shut.

Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the better person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

Once when I visited her, she scuffed around the house in pink pile-lined slippers you'd wear only while waiting for the police to discover you many days dead.

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.

It's perfectly natural to doubt your judgment about doubting your judgment.

I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced
the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.

He never told me that he loved me."
"Some men don't," she says. "Some men say it all the time and don't mean it."
I recognize myself in the latter category, not with Demetri but with one of his predecessors. I sometimes said "I love you" to Josh because I was afraid I didn't; toward the end, I hardly said it at all, and when I did I meant, I WISH I LOVED YOU.

Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you've ever met.

He wants me to boss you around."
"We'll pick up a pair of stilettos on the way home," he said.
I said, "I need to go back to Philiadelphia.

I have acute pancreatitis."
"I thought it was just average looking.

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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.

She seems sort of lost.' I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

She looked like someone who was used to having other people wait on her. I wonder what that's like, to never have to worry about filling the silence.

You smell like a bar," he said.
I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, "You smell like a poem.

There are things that two people say in the middle of the night That don't make sense to a third at breakfast.

He was some sort of boxing champion," she told me the night she took me out to celebrate my graduation. "He was always punching someone in the nose."
"Macho," I said.
"No," she said. "It was the clarity of expression that appealed to him.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another ... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

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.

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.

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.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn't realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.

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

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.

Today was the first day of the rest of my life. It was okay, I think the second day of the rest of my life will be better

I never expected anyone in my family to change, and especially not my father, who changed first and most profoundly: He died.

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.

No," he said, and he snapped his fingers. "You'll come work for me at K
. And be a real associate editor."
I said, "I could bring you up on charges for that."
"What?"
"Work harassment in the sexual place.

We change into our bathing suits, both of us pale like larvae, and then we walk down to the water.

He's losing weight," I say. "He doesn't sleep anymore." It occurs to me that this is how cults weaken the will of initiates.
Robert says, "It sounds to me like he's in love," and adds that the world's most coveted state is characterized by unrelieved insecurity and almost constant pain.

By late August, I'm on my second sublet, and I've been working as a copywriter long enough to know I'm not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I'm about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.

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

Even a perfect understanding of failed love is the booby prize.

In a cab home from a jazz club, he said, "You act like I just want to sleep with you." He said, "I want to everything with you.

When I could talk, I said, "I don't know what I did wrong."
Dena sighed, "You care too much.

During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous.

I said, "What's your goal in life?" and winced at how corny and earnest I sounded.
He looked away. He thought. "I guess I'm trying to become a better man than the one I'm hardwired to be.

The elevator door opens right into the loft. I was counting on those extra few seconds of hallway before facing the party, the party we are now part of and in, a party with people talking and laughing and having a party time. I think, I am a solid, trying to do a liquid's job.

It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He's like me, just with different details.