Quotes from Stewart O'Nan

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

They should." "Should be like a wood bee," she said. It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience.

Often, as she leafed through the sticky, plastic-coated pages, spotting herself with a frizzy perm or wearing a loud, printed blouse, she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.

Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

There was mystery at the heart of any of marriage, secrets even people close to it would never know.

Like a funeral, a birthday wasn't yours but for the people who loved you.

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

Her anger was the fuel she used to keep going.

He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn't come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...

She didn't want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar

Theirs was a private language, not shared with the rest of the world, and so exempt from censure, sheer burlesque.

While she was away, he'd forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

Being agreeable didn't make people less difficult.

Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.

There's nothing to do. You've been in the business long enough to understand grief. That's the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don't want to, you don't want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death's taught you that much at least.

Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.