Quotes from Amy Koppelman

I'm a mom first. That's all I really care about - being a good mom and a good wife. The writing always comes second for me.

Resiliency, like a cartwheel, requires core strength and a disregard for gravity. Only one of which can be willed.

You know what happens when you feed the birds? They forget to fly south and freeze to death.

Belittling nostalgia is a frightened man's parlor trick. Be grateful for any prize. Even a paper fortress, albeit briefly, provides shelter from the rain.

But then again a good person doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck around for sport. Good and bad, though, aren't mutually exclusive are they? At least she didn't, Laney rationalizes, at least she didn't pretend that what she had with John, with any of the men, was more than it was. Didn't fool herself into thinking she had any jurisdiction over their freedom. That the fucking had anything to do with

If her history has taught her anything it's that hate, not love, is the more powerful of the two emotions. Anyway

I was with a girlfriend of mine last night and we were talking about David Foster Wallace. It's been three years since he killed himself, I said. And she said, Yep. Waited a beat. And he's still dead.

Weather, she thinks, is impartial. You don't need to be principled to enjoy a breezy day like this. You merely have to be alive.

Desperation, not desire, is the root of atrocity.

There are people like that, people who don't beat themselves up, don't take every little injustice personally. Those people, same callous fuckers that walk past a legless guy without a pause, those are the ones who win.

Death is a manifestation, the complete and total embodiment of fear.

If depression is darkness, then the child of depression grows up living in the shadow of that darkness. What we inherit - indiscriminate.

People just don't get it. Appearance is arbitrary. And if it's not arbitrary the it's compensation. Pretty face, ugly heart. Either way, it's not something earned.

If the castle is hope, memory is the moat that surrounds it.

Laney is thinking about this as Donny fucks her. It feels good getting fucked in the ass like this. The pain, a final and utter submission. No man, she thinks, can love a girl whose ass he fucked. Or even think he loves. Later

There is the world as it exists, and then, just next to it, the world one creates in order to exist. The boundaries limited only by ones imagination.

A little into it they fucked for a kid. Squeezed one out. Couple years later fucked for another. Now she's here. One more broad in a big-ass truck with the ring, the two kids, the latest cell phone.

Whatever the motivation factor, the specific ratio of grief to cruelty is immaterial. i left Ray, without warning, as he slept. Out of sight isn't out of mind but it's out of the line of vision, which is something. Because you can keep quite busy like this. Moving forward.

I have been misunderstood more than I've been understood in my life.