Binnie Kirshenbaum Quotes
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Lots of things should be, but aren't.
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I loved Vincent and he loved me in the abiding way most couples in good marriages love each other, that way in which every once in a while there is a longing for someone you haven't yet met. A longing that comes upon you while you are loading the dishwasher or weeding the garden or sitting in front of the television or turning out the light to go to sleep, and you don't even know what it is, this longing, and you think maybe you're in need of a vacation or maybe you are dying because the ache of it hurts so fucking much…That ache, it went away when I met Henry; it went away as if it had been a headache instead of located nowhere precisely. Its not that I wanted to fall in love with Henry, but I did just the same because you can't keep from falling in love any more than you can keep snow from falling from the sky in winter. Gravity is gravity.
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Sometimes late and never amount to the same thing. Sometimes, it has to be now or never.
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Everyone does deserve a second chance, although we don't often get one, and even when we do get a second chance, we're likely to make the same mistake again. The things we learn later rather than sooner tend to result from harsh lessons, but mostly we learn nothing at all.
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The end of all things--a book, a life, a summer, a marriage, the last bite of cake, the last of innocence lost, a love affair--is always sad, at least a little bit sad, because it is the end, the end of that.
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Jerusalem Maiden is a page-turning and thought-provoking novel. Extraordinary sensory detail vividly conjures another time and place; heroine Esther Kaminsky’s poignant struggle transcends time and place. The ultimate revelation here: for many women, if not most, 2011 is no different than 1911, but triumph is nonetheless possible.
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A token of love comes in a box because love itself cannot be contained.
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A kind of happy that, if manifested into tangibility, would've taken the shape of a daisy.
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Semille wept not because she did something stupid; she wept because she *didn't* do something stupid. Sometimes, to do something stupid--to disobey your parents, to rush into battle, to speak out of turn, to ruin your life--is a far better thing to do than to do nothing at all.
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But surely he had told that story before. All of us, we tell our stories over and over again. Not in the same way and we don't always recognize them for what they are, the same way we don't always recognize that all creation myths boil down to God and man and a thunderstorm.
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To not want to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.
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Except, how do we go on when what was best is behind us? When the longing is not for someone you have not yet met, but for someone you knew and lost?
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That kind of empty; when hope is no longer deferred but evaporated, and try as you might, and you do try, you can't find the pleasure in the little things. A fine meal, good music, a breathtaking view of the landscape, the smell of the ocean, snow falling, it all adds up to a storehouse of memories and regrets, and you can't imagine there's a perchance left to be had.
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Henry told me he is often the life of the party, as if he didn't already know that to be the life of the party is the most sad and pathetic of all things to be.
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Hers was not love lost; it was love denied.
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I might like to believe that every day, every hour, every minute of every hour of every day with Henry was *not* the happiest time I ever knew. I might like to believe that I am remembering it that way only because the happiest time ever makes it a better story. Because that's all you have left after people are gone from you, some things and some stories.
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But there are no happy endings unless we cut the story short, and as far as I know, there are no rules of etiquette to a miracle, either.
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In this way my mother fell short as a parent, which was something I had to learn to accept because it's how she was, and either you accept people as they are or you turn your back on them and walk away. Those are the choices: forbearance or flight, although that philosophy was slow in coming to me, and for many years, I expected more from people than they could give.
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Maybe it has something to do with the pull of the moon because, despite the statistical improbability of any two people meeting up, it is inevitable that the tremulous are drawn to the languished, the sick to the broken, the forsaken to the sad, every pot has its cover, and the funny to the funny ones, too.
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But there's always a choice. We make our choice, and then we put the blame on fate.
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I leave off mid-sentence, and then can finish it the next day with less anxiety expended than for a new thought.
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The moral of the story is this: sometimes, to do nothing, to do nothing at all, is the sorriest thing ever.
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I probably said something about being happy for him, because I was happy for him, although to be happy for someone else doesn't mean that you are happy for yourself.