Quotes from Darin Strauss

The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts.

If your relationship fills you with a sense of luck, you've chosen well.

We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.

What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register?

Your muscles can tense with hope.

And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you didn't risk your face in the mirror.

Love was now a mild streamlet that advanced in drips around my feet; despite how hard I worked at tenderness, I could not drown in a thing that shallow.

So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable. The school part of our lives continues to be the school part for eighteen years, the work parts stay the work parts, and if we're lucky nothing disarranges them; the small inconsistencies get buried under talk, explanations, rescheduling. If everything couldn't continue as planned, no real plans could be made.

The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun.

this empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body.

We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. So it's an epiphany after all. You have it in your hand the whole time.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.