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Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.
Melissa Bank -
I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.
Melissa Bank
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I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.
Melissa Bank -
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.
Melissa Bank -
The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.
Melissa Bank -
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.
Melissa Bank -
You don't need a reason to forgive... If you want to go on with someone, that is what you do.
Melissa Bank -
I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.
Melissa Bank
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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.
Melissa Bank -
She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.
Melissa Bank -
With so much sky and so much river, you couldn't help seeing the big picture. It was what you already knew, but crowding into the subway or rushing to a movie, you only saw it for a second, and close up. Now I took a good long look. I'd always heard you couldn't see stars in Manhattan because of all the lights. But here they all were. Here was my night in shining armor.
Melissa Bank -
I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.
Melissa Bank -
He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything. After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me. Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’ ‘That was him.’ Jake shakes his head. ‘What?’ ‘He’s not for you,’ he says. I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know? ‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’ Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’ ‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.
Melissa Bank -
It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.
Melissa Bank
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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.
Melissa Bank -
Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.
Melissa Bank -
Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.
Melissa Bank -
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.
Melissa Bank -
You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.
Melissa Bank -
We are all children until our fathers die.
Melissa Bank
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Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the better person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.
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.
Melissa Bank -
People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.
Melissa Bank -
Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.
Melissa Bank