Favorite Passages

[KxBurns]

Please share your favorite passages from the book here.

I have several! I love chapters five and six. I also think this sentence, which closes Chapter Twelve, is beautiful:

"'To Emily!' they cried. 'To Emily!' their voices echoing throughout the small, dark room, tiled, as it was, in glittering shards of mirror, in which they saw themselves reflected a thousand times over, and broken into as many parts."

And I enjoy the passage on page 328 where Emily reflects on her youthful aspirations:

"In May, Emily would be thirty. Her moment for greatness--or, that particular sort of greatness--had passed, hadn't it?

But that moment had existed. She was sure of it. There had been a window, a brief and exhilarating time, when something might have happened--when she might have become (so painful to think of it now) if not a star per se, a--what?...

It was hours later, when she realized she'd walked right by the nurses' station without asking about magazines for Lil--or making a case, as Lil had bid her, for her friend's sanity."

By the way, you'll have a thread soon for posting your reviews of the book; no need to use this thread for that. Thanks

[olivialove]

"Maybe she preferred being alone and she'd simply been conditioned by the media- or society in general- to think she had to partner off with someone and start a family and so on."

-256

"But she'd gone, of course she'd gone, as she'd thought of little but him-her mind, returning eternally to him, the feel of his hands on her, the set of his jaw-and she felt she had to see what came next, as though their fates were ordained, their story already written, and she needed merely to show up to catch the ending."

- p156

"You've never really been in love, have you?  You think everything is  so clean and easy.  That I'll just, like, get a pedicure and go out to dinner and everything will be fine.  But it doesn't work like that.  Life is messy.  It's dirty."

p.136

"And yet Metropolitan today, was devoid of life.  Which was just as well.  She felt disgusted with humanity, and with herself."

-p137

[EbonyAngel]

I have several favorites but the one that really sticks out is from Emily.

"You had to be completely satisfied with yourself, certain that you could live forever alone-she saw herself like Katherine Hepburn, in slacks and turtle neck, rattling around her cluttered apartment-before you could attract others."

This is like the saying, "You have to love yourself, before you can love others".

[mapleann]

When I was reading the book, I jotted down Joanna in the margin. I did feel that this book was a her relevant classical literature, from Dave's POV, "thinking he should really get up  and write down the snippet of melody drifting in and out of his brain--he comforted himself with the thought that he was destined for higher sorts of things than pop songs, for this hybrid music he imagined, this relevant classical music" (p. 174).

My ex was diagnosed with bi-polar after we separated. When Clara was descibed as, "wore a veneer, a thin veneer of health that was beginning, slowly, to crack," (p.285) I wanted to put the book down.  It was such a true statement of dealing with an individual with a personality or emotional disorder. You can sense that a breakdown is coming, hear the cracking of the veneer, and know that the image of health is no more than a painting covering the painful and rusted surface inside, yet you shield your eyes because you cannot face the truth that the precious metal is only 2 mm thick.

[detailmuse]

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mapleann wrote:

My ex was diagnosed with bi-polar after we separated. When Clara was descibed as, "wore a veneer, a thin veneer of health that was beginning, slowly, to crack," (p.285) I wanted to put the book down.  It was such a true statement of dealing with an individual with a personality or emotional disorder. You can sense that a breakdown is coming, hear the cracking of the veneer, and know that the image of health is no more than a painting covering the painful and rusted surface inside, yet you shield your eyes because you cannot face the truth that the precious metal is only 2 mm thick.

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Speaking of beautiful writing...

[olivialove]

A few more of my favorites....

"Things are much more black-and-white.  She loves you or she doesn't.  You have a job or you don't.  Your parents are alive or dead....The truth is the truth.  Incontrovertible facts.  How it makes you feel, thats subjective." (394)

"That's the big difference, she thought, between novels-or movies-and life.  In real life, people don't actually change." (76)

"...her head was beginning to ache with all she couldn't say."

"Marriage is marriage.  It means pledging yourself to one person.  If you don't believe in marriage, then you shouldn't have gotten married." (130)

[Dances_through…]

Chapter One: "...their obstreperous daughter was submitting to the ancient rite of marriage."

pg 31: "Sadie was quiet-reserved rather than shy, like Beth, but lapsed with drink, into fits of irony-fueled giddiness."

pg 60: "I can't believe Sadie didn't tell me." Beth suddenly felt the full force of her absence- they had all been living their lives without her, moving forward, falling in love, getting married, while she had largely stayed in place: another college town, another series of papers."

[booksJT]

I enjoyed the book but there was no favorite passage for me.