Quotes from Binnie Kirshenbaum

Everyone does deserve a second chance, although we don't often get one, and even when we do get a second chance, we're likely to make the same mistake again. The things we learn later rather than sooner tend to result from harsh lessons, but mostly we learn nothing at all.

The end of all things--a book, a life, a summer, a marriage, the last bite of cake, the last of innocence lost, a love affair--is always sad, at least a little bit sad, because it is the end, the end of that.

Hers was not love lost; it was love denied.

To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.

The moral of the story is this: sometimes, to do nothing, to do nothing at all, is the sorriest thing ever.

Lots of things should be, but aren't.

Sometimes late and never amount to the same thing. Sometimes, it has to be now or never.

People who are clinically depressed have their own disturbances with food. For some, it's as if hand to mouth were an involuntary reflex, as if food could fill the abyss. Which it can't, and they grow fat, which does nothing good for their state of mind. The others are rarely hungry or else they are never hungry. They emaciate, become insubstantial, a manifestation of the wish to disappear. Bunny is one of the thin ones.

Fun not shared is not fun. You can derive great pleasure alone, enjoy yourself enormously, experience bliss, but fun requires someone else, like a friend or a dog.

People who are not easy to like, they have feelings just like nice people do.

But there's always a choice. We make our choice, and then we put the blame on fate.

In this way my mother fell short as a parent, which was something I had to learn to accept because it's how she was, and either you accept people as they are or you turn your back on them and walk away. Those are the choices: forbearance or flight, although that philosophy was slow in coming to me, and for many years, I expected more from people than they could give.

A token of love comes in a box because love itself cannot be contained.

Some people don't like to remember," Vincent said. "Not even the good things?" "Especially not the good things.

Henry told me he is often the life of the party, as if he didn't already know that to be the life of the party is the most sad and pathetic of all things to be.

I might like to believe that every day, every hour, every minute of every hour of every day with Henry was *not* the happiest time I ever knew. I might like to believe that I am remembering it that way only because the happiest time ever makes it a better story. Because that's all you have left after people are gone from you, some things and some stories.

A kind of happy that, if manifested into tangibility, would've taken the shape of a daisy.

Except, how do we go on when what was best is behind us? When the longing is not for someone you have not yet met, but for someone you knew and lost?

And worse than the hurt of not being someone special is the shame of it, the shame of how much I want that, to be someone special.

A friend from work should be a compartmentalized and exclusive friendship; that is, my friend from work, as opposed to our friend from my work. Everyone should be free to go to lunch or dinner with a good friend from work without your significant other sitting there at the table letting go with bull-snort exhales of boredom laced with rising irritation while you and your friend are having what amounts to a private conversation about office intrigue.

When our surroundings are overwhelmingly depressing, how can we be anything but depressed?

Maybe it has something to do with the pull of the moon because, despite the statistical improbability of any two people meeting up, it is inevitable that the tremulous are drawn to the languished, the sick to the broken, the forsaken to the sad, every pot has its cover, and the funny to the funny ones, too.

But surely he had told that story before. All of us, we tell our stories over and over again. Not in the same way and we don't always recognize them for what they are, the same way we don't always recognize that all creation myths boil down to God and man and a thunderstorm.

That kind of empty; when hope is no longer deferred but evaporated, and try as you might, and you do try, you can't find the pleasure in the little things. A fine meal, good music, a breathtaking view of the landscape, the smell of the ocean, snow falling, it all adds up to a storehouse of memories and regrets, and you can't imagine there's a perchance left to be had.