Quotes from Stewart O'Nan

You're proud of your ability to both believe and question everything. Secretly you think everyone does, but at some point they give in, surrender to the comfort of certainty. It's too much trouble, this endless jousting of belief and doubt, too tiring. Finally you suppose it will break you, yet strangely it's the only thing that keeps you going - though, true, at times you feel unbalanced, even somewhat mad.

the idea of luck and happiness. How much of life was accidental and how much was work, and practically

It's as if the Sox have walked through the Stadium driving stakes through every single ghost's, vampire's and Yankee fan's rotten, cobwebby heart.

While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn't the fastest or smartest or best at everything.

Worry rolls inside you like a wheel.

It doesn't seem enough, and as he starts them off, you want to call after him, tell him how you too question the ways of faith, the injustice, the never-ending losses, that it stuns you too, that you still grieve for Mrs. Goetz and Arnie and Eric Soderholm just as their families do, though everyone else seems to have forgotten. Lydia Flynn, the tramp behind Meyer's, the men in the swamps of Kentucky. If a sparrow fall, you want to say, it is not lost. I will remember. We are all saved.

It's just a hard moment for him, a low point, not some soul-shaking crisis; you know those aren't sudden or public, they take years, worming inside you like a disease.

You want to tell him about the conversations they have, the arguments over things long forgotten. You want to impress on him how many stories everyone has within them, how much each death diminishes Friendship, especially with the young people leaving. But again, he's done enough. And he's young, you don't expect him to understand.

Like many men in their forties, he tended to dress in the style of his youth as if it were the current fashion.

Who knew what happened in a marriage, what bargains and compromises people struck?

On that question Henry kept his opinion to himself. It was all speculation anyway. People were going to do what they were going to do. After a certain age he'd ceased to believe he might influence their lives.

The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he'd done the same.

He'd have to cut it up and bag the pieces, another chore.

It's true what the natives say. Every time someone takes your picture, the camera steals a little bit of your soul." "That explains Bette Davis.

He means people who let their faith take the place of their reason, people who believe this world is just a prelude to another, more glorious life. He means people like you. *

You're unsure what you think of him, a fact you pride yourself on. It defines you, this willingness to hear all sides, love everyone. You've stopped believing in evil. Is that a sin? You know what your mother would say, but justice needs to be fair-handed, the dead deserve your compassion. It's your job to understand, to forgive, not simply your custom.

Faith will always save you. It's a question, really, and you think the answer could make a good sermon. When won't faith save you? When you believe too much in this world. In yourself. In anything but God.

What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women--all people, finally--complicated?

solitary golfers struck him as a squirrelly, self-involved breed, like hermits or fly fishermen.

while she discounted his adoration of her beauty—based, as it was, on a much younger woman—she also relied on it, and as time passed she was grateful for the restorative powers of his memory. No one else saw her the way he did. He knew the eighteenyear-old lifeguard she used to be, and the fashionable grad student, the coltish young mother.

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?