Quotes from Jean Thompson

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?

We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later." Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this.

She had a heart like a Twinkie, full of oversweet goo, yes, a real junk-food heart.

The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you'd signed up for a credit card without knowing it.

Nobody knows what to do when there's a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.

After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz.

Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn't make it any easier to put up with.

Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating.

What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on.

Maybe getting to know a child wasn't entirely unlike meditation. You kept going at it from all different angles, and once in a while something clicked.

It was still very wet under the trees. A careless tug at a branch might flip cold rainbow-edged drops down your back. And the sky was gray as concrete. But they enjoyed the silence, the soft sucking ground matted with last year's needles.

The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences and bawdy women." Rolled with laughter. Parent's fear, college student's desire.

She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself.

He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session.

He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.

His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.

But it was hard not to think of her mother as she moved from the sink to the oven and back again, tasting and chopping and doing her best impersonation of her mother. She felt, not a presence, exactly. Something more earthbound, a better understanding, perhaps, of her mother and the life she lived. The endless small chores, the worries, never enough time, and always the barely movable obstacles of her husband and children.

Head full of beer, fists jammed into his empty pockets, halos of blur around the parking lot lights, yup, one more wasted evening, and even though you wanted to believe you had an infinite supply of evenings available for wasting, you didn't.

Once she'd gone, nobody spoke, except for his father who asked what was on next. Blake said it was Newhart.

You didn't give up wanting things because your life had put them out of reach.

The evening is nearly over. Before long it will be last call and Good Night, Ladies. Only a few more minutes and exhilaration will start its inevitable leakage. Even the best, dizziest times have that moment of deflation when people realize that everything has already happened. But for now all possibilities are intact.

Because what were older women meant to do with themselves, besides prop up everybody else's lives and drink too much wine at book club meetings? No one, Laura was convinced, was as invisible and as easily dismissed as the tribe of women like herself, with short gray hair and glasses.

Her mother chose to martyr herself to some domestic goddess routine that everybody else in the world had wised up to long ago.