1. “I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.”
2. “It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
3. “But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy, all the time. Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them.”
4. “People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.”
5. “It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn’t always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn’t.”
6. “I never knew I was capable of being ridiculous over a man. It’s a relief.”
7. “My mother had always told her kids: if you’re about to do something, and you want to know if it’s a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.”
8. “I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It”
9. “Unconditional love is an undisciplined love and, as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”
10. “It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.”
11. “You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
12. “I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good.”
13. “Go is truly the only person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don’t feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don’t clarify, I don’t doubt, I don’t worry. I don’t tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than I tell anyone else, by far.”
14. “Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.”
15. “Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite”
16. “He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse.”
17. “We are all working from the same dog-eared script.”
18. “I know, I know, I’m being a girl.”
19. “The moony, girlish state her notes had left me in, it sickened me. It embarrassed me. Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes a part of your DNA, that changes you. After all these years, Amy could still play me. She could write a few notes and get me back completely.”
20. “He pauses, and I know he is about to lie. The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.”
21. “I thought it would make me feel better to have the man vanished from the earth, but I actually felt a massive, frightening hollowness open up in my chest. I had spent my life comparing myself to my father, and now he was gone.”
22. “Is that wrong? I don’t even know anymore.”
23. “And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.”
24. “When you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin”
25. “It’s a very female thing, isn’t it, to take one boys’ night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?”
26. “Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.”
27. “He Giving Treed me out of existence.”
28. “Stay away from boys. They’ll either throw rocks or look up your skirt.”
29. “He never had the talent, just the hard wish.”
30. “The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.”
31. “I am a great husband because I am very afraid she may kill me.”
32. “One should never marry a man who doesn’t own a decent set of scissors. That would be my advice. It leads to bad things.”
33. “People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.”
34. “There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
35. “It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don’t like cherries.”
36. “People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan.”
37. “Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife, but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her.”
38. “It’s the kind of place where people mill about.”
39. “I was the girl who battles oblivion and won. The chances were about 1 percent, but I did it.”
40. “It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such things as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.”
41. “I don’t have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that.”
42. “I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you to like her.”
43. “Love makes you want to be a better man – right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”
44. “Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.”
45. “A year ago today, I was undoing my husband. Now I am almost done reassembling him.”
46. “I know sometimes you think you are moving through this world alone, unseen, unnoticed. But don’t believe that for a second. I have made a study of you. I know what you are going to do before you do it. I know where you’ve been and I know where you’re going. For this anniversary, I’ve arranged a trip: Follow your beloved river, up up up!”
47. “I was the embodiment of every writer’s worst fear: a cliché.”
48. “I was speaking loudly, I realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous, but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger.”
49. “Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that’s how the hating first began. I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s where it started, I think.”
50. “I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry.”
51. “Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.”
52. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”
53. “Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.”
54. “Sometimes I feel like Nick has decided on a version of me that doesn’t exist.”
55. “A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.”
56. “We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”
57. “I’m not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age.”
58. “Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial – you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.”
59. “He’s calling you a Cool Girl to fool you! That’s what men do: they try to make it sound like you are the cool girl so you will bow to their wishes. Like a car salesman saying, how much do you want to pay for this beauty? When you didn’t agree to buy it yet.”
60. “Marriage is compromise and hard work,and then more hard work and communication and compromise. And then work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”
61. “But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink. Our”
62. “If she’s sad or upset or angry, she needs to be alone-she fears a man dismissing her womanly tears.”
63. “He was one of those guys who’d pronounce I’m a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.”
64. “Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. ‘Stop thinking’, swig, ’empty your head’, swig, ‘now, seriously empty your head’.”
65. “Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn’t handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and average-ness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became.”
66. “She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.”
67. “People do what they’re supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation—they’re”
68. “It was one of those moments where you saved me, you made me laugh at just the right time.”
69. “The Midwest is full of these types of people: the nice-enoughs. Nice enough but with a soul made of plastic—easy to mold, easy to wipe down.”
70. “It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.”
71. “Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.”
72. “I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?”
73. “He could cheat on me and he would never tell me, and he would think less and less of me for not figuring it out. He would see me across the breakfast table, innocently slurping cereal, and know that I am a fool, and how can anyone respect a fool?”
74. “I often don’t say this out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”
75. “I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”
76. “I often don’t say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”
77. “If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway.”
78. “Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.”
79. “I don’t understand the point of being together if you’re not the happiest.”
80. “Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry – the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.”
81. “Our room overlooks the parking lot, and if I peek out from behind the stiff beige curtains”
82. “Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what’s coveted, what’s au courant? I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.”
83. “It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”
84. “If you couldn’t find something in thirty seconds, you were losing money, his father always said. Return phone calls immediately was another rule Clay had been taught to obey.”
85. “I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”
86. “It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.”
87. “All this time I’d thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.”
88. “I just want to live until I can’t anymore,” she said.”
89. “Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax.”
90. “I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.”
91. “In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation.”
92. “Should I remove my soul before I come inside?”
93. “She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment – that just anyone could like you.”
94. “I spoke in a soft, soothing voice, a voice wearing a cardigan.”
95. “I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.”
96. “There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”
97. “He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.”
98. “I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”
99. “He never had the talent, just the hard wish.”
