Quotes from Jennifer Haigh

If you happen to be a woman, all problems are female problems.

As we grow, we learn to overcome the tendency to run and hide from ourselves and our feelings. When we feel trapped or pressured, it takes great spiritual and emotional strength to be honest.

He talks the way sprinters run and dancers dance, an elite athlete. He talks as though he was born to talk. At

In the sad B movie that was life in Grantham, actors were recast periodically, replaced with younger models, but the script itself never changed. It was that kind of town.

It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

To Mike—to most people who have ever known her—Kath Conlon has disappeared completely. It is an addict's trick, this vanishing act, this dizzying plunge through a dim portal into a dark and beguiling parallel world.

At a bar addiction is normalized, made to seem a regular part of living: the warm light and familiar faces, friendship or the illusion of it. Addicts are lonely creatures.

Severe cases of Turner's, where a girl's second X chromosome was missing entirely, were easy to identify. Small stature plus certain telltale physical features—low-set ears, a low hairline, folds of excess skin at the sides of the neck—could have no other cause.

Driving east into the bright sun, he'd been dogged by a creeping sense of déjà vu, but it wasn't until Kath called to Aidan—Help Father with the cooler!—that he recognized the scene from his own childhood. How strange, how disorienting, to find himself in the man's seat, driving, when in his mind he was still the little boy.

He spent two weeks in South Shore Hospital in a state of near oblivion; and when he woke, it was as though he'd taken a trip around the world and lost most of his luggage along the way. Heavy bags they were, packed with thirty years of indignities, rages, brawls and indiscretions.

imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh's renaissance, the city's transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life. Or

All these explanations, and more, had been offered to Arthur. He could choose from among them whichever he liked, like drawing a card from a deck.

Kath woke the next morning in a state of dazed wonder. It is a sensation I have experienced myself, a frank amazement when my cynicism is confounded. When, defying all precedent, the thing I most desire actually appears.

The human heart: its expansions and contractions, its electrics and hydraulics, the warm tides that move and fill it.

Watching, I dread my own womanhood, the day when I too will follow along carrying bags of groceries, my mission wherever I go to feed other people who take actual part in life while I am simply the catering staff.

For years, struggling to raise the daughter she'd expected to have, she had failed to see the one she'd gotten.

Show me a man of fifty who doesn't regret the lives he hasn't lived.

The events of his childhood had never left him. Instead the memory had grown watery, indistinct, like something he'd dreamed. Abused, molested: these were not terms he used, even to himself.

Half of sobriety was wishing you'd never started: if you'd never taken that first drink, first bump, you could have stayed clean forever with no sweat at all. Instead, it became your life's work.

He could have cured cancer by now, if he'd never gotten high.

What a relief, that laughter! What a blessed release.

His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth.

But once you start taking money out of my pocket, I got to say something." He spits deliberately. "Your land sets right in the middle of where they need to run them wells. I'm getting wells, Richard here is getting wells. Hell, even Jim Norton is getting wells, with the little spread he has. But until you sign that paper, none of us are going to see a dime." Mack

He has never joined the coffee-drinking masses at his neighborhood Starbucks, who assemble daily in order to ignore each other completely—humans of every age and description deafened by headphones, staring dumbly at their glowing screens. Each morning Darren studies them as he waits in line for his double espresso. Then he orders his coffee, sweetens generously, and leaves. The