Quotes from Melissa Bank

He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.

I live by Edith Wharton's rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.

I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.

We are all children until our fathers die.

You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy. It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.

Sometimes you're loved because of your weaknesses. What you can't do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.

You don't need a reason to forgive... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.

You sense that he's dangerous but don't now why - and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.

You smell like a bar," he said. I thought, You smell like a library. But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, "You smell like a poem.

I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.

My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.

Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.

It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it's this way for everyone.

But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.

You did the best you could," and she seemed to believe I had. I said, "I've just been going through the motions," using the expression my father had after he'd watched my first tennis lesson. "Sweetie," she said, "that's what a lot of life is.

You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.

Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, 'Just be yourself,' as though I had any idea who that might be.

He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.

I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.

Dante's definition of hell: proximity without intimacy. From the Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing