Quotes from Andrew Martin

So I did something that you're not supposed to do, one more addition to an expanding universe of said things.

You are . . . depressed? Bored?" "Are there other feelings?

So I took a leave from school to "support Julia" and "write my book," the second of which people took far too literally.

Unfortunately I'm one of those people who writes better when they're unhappy.

I was mad that I couldn't enjoy it, that I'd made it impossible for myself to have a nice vacation.

She'd become an idea. She was an abstract thing I wanted, a thing that I already had , really, if I could keep it.

I do tend to like people in practice, even though I've built an airtight

The night felt forced, off-kilter. We were trying to have fun, fixating on what was available to us, but it was a stretch.

If it still wasn't working when she went to bed, she could start something new in the morning.

She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely suppressed rage.

I wanted to understand her. I wanted her, more dubiously, to understand me .

In order to follow your heart, one must do the wrong thing

I do tend to like people in practice, even though I've built an airtight case against them in principle.

What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible.

A man washing up secretly imagines himself to be the head surgeon in an operating theater. He is entitled to bark out peremptory orders: 'Right! I'm ready for the pudding things now!

But, like lots of people she knew, she mostly wanted it so she wouldn't have to want it anymore, so that people would get off her back about how she didn't have any.

I just want her to be happy. But I don't think that's what she wants.

It's just really hard when you've got something, and you think something is going to happen next, and then it's taken away from you. It's one thing when you don't know what you're losing, but to have it, and understand how precious it is, and still lose it . . . It fucking sucks.

I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention—like a Hardy novel where I'd exceeded my society's allowance for freethinking and was now being punished.

It had occurred to me lately that it was much more possible than I'd previously considered to be both 'self-aware' and fundamentally wrong about the nature of the self.

Our lives aren't worth dying over.

I put the story aside and added it to the growing list of things I was inadequate at or incapable of doing.

It was like, oh, we've found the still, dead center of things. This is the quiet middle place where nothing can be done.

My goals at these things usually extended no further than making at least one moderately clever comment and trying not to spill anything on my shirt.