Quotes from melissa banks

You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.

Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching. I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window. Nobody was watching, except me.

Does he make you happy? Sure, I said. He told me I didn't know what real happiness was. You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.

It doesn't work like that, she said, and I was hoping she would tell me how it did work. Maybe she could see that, because she went on. Sometimes you're loved because of your weaknesses, she said. What you can't do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.

I realized I was waiting for his permission to leave

Well, old dear, I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

I tried to go back and talk about what I did know. I told her about one girl he'd brought home from Cornell; I'd asked if she was his girlfriend, and he's said, When you define something, you limit it.

You are making it harder than it has to be, she says. I say, And should I forgive him because it would be easier? You don't nee a reason to forgive, she says. If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.

He went to the bar and stood there a while. But he was in the way of people getting their drinks. He moved to the edge of the crowd and just watched. Suddenly it seemed, he was drunk, in a suit that didn't fit, at a party where he didn't know anyone, and he was standing alone.

In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said. I smiled. "What?" I said, "I was just thinking of your father.