Quotes from Matthew Norman

Significant things shouldn't begin or end at Applebee's. You

Yeah?" I touch my Hot Pocket. It should be cool enough by sometime next week to not completely fuck my mouth up.

I wonder what his name is, the guy back in Arlington. I wonder if she hurt him or if he hurt her. I don't ask, though, of course, because it doesn't really matter. She's here now.

Facebook is the literal manifestation of all our regrets, looping and looping, for free, on our computers and phones. People who should be gone and safely out of our lives forever are there again, one cryptic little glimpse at a time, reminding us of all the things we should or shouldn't have done.

Because this is what I wanted to look like. I wanted to look different. So I made myself look different—better than just fine. If you want to be something, you make a decision, and then you make it happen. It's called personal responsibility.

She tells me she's a certified smeller of books and that that is probably her best quality. "So It Goes." is tattooed on the inside of her left forearm.

I instantly like people who laugh at my jokes. It's a weakness of mine.

We're all damaged. Every single beautiful, stupid, precious one of us. Damaged, damaged, damaged.

When you're having sex again, it makes you wonder why you weren't before. What could possibly have been bad enough to make you stop doing THAT?

That's the thing I hate most about my brain, the way it stores and catalogs things, all this dumb shit on a giant hard drive in my head, so I'm forced to obsess over it all like a crazy person.

Power means never having to say you're sorry.

Parenting is mostly bribery . . . and yelling.

We hold on to the shitty things the tightest, for some reason. And

Maybe that's just what moving on is, not getting over, but skipping over. And

If my penis were a writer/director, it would be Woody Allen - small, neurotic, and, frankly, hit or miss.

They didn't hate her when you were in high school. They made fun of her. She was the butt of jokes. But they didn't hate her. That's what people do now. They don't disagree, they hate.

Right when you find yourself not thinking about her at all, there she'll be, right at the end of the story to fuck with your head one last time." She

Sometimes in life, it doesn't matter that you've just woken up on a floor. Or that you haven't brushed your teeth. Or that your hair is a mess and you're wearing the clothes you slept in. Sometimes you just have to be polite.

I think you'll be a great teacher," said Gary. That's his role in my life: blind encourager and ambassador of false senses of security.

So much of marriage is spent only half paying attention to each other. Talking while driving. Talking while watching Netflix. Talking while staring at a toddler, or scanning utility bills or catalogs from the mail or Evites for some distant weekend.

The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.

Then we lapse into silence. It's these silences that do damage, that reveal glimpses of the distressed foundation struggling under the weight of things.

I don't think -" I begin, but then I stop there. Strangely enough, this sounds like a full, declarative sentence, as if I'm standing in a bar shouting out one of my most obvious character flaws. I don't think!

Married silence is a specific kind of silence, typically one in which the woman goes mute while the man pretends as if it's perfectly normal that she hasn't spoken in hours.