Great Big Beautiful Life

“All I ever want is to be around you. It’s not just sex. I mean, I do want to have sex with you.”

“When you don’t have the people who love you around, reminding you who you are, that story feels bigger and realer than anything else. You lose yourself inside the character with your name and face.”

“But if you want something done right, you don’t go with easy. I’ve thought about it, and this is how I want to do it.”

“I wanted to punish them, honestly, but I couldn’t figure out any way to do it. The best I could come up with was giving them more spectacle, feeding their unquenchable thirst for drama. They wanted a madwoman, and that’s what I was. I ripped up our gardens and left all the flowers in trash cans at the gate. I left the house barefoot, and chopped off my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. I wore the same dress I’d worn to our wedding to the burial, and I relished every headline about my deranged behavior, because at least it seemed like proof that I had some control over who they said I was. After a couple of weeks, that stopped soothing the ache and all I wanted was to be alone. To feel my pain completely, without interruption. I sent my mother home, paid the staff, and let them go.”

“I feel like you’re mine. Like you’re mine in a way no one else ever has been.”

“Well, if you’d like, I can get you my mom’s phone number and the two of you can compare notes about all the more impressive jobs I could’ve had, and then I can reach out to your dad and let him know I agree you should’ve played basketball in high school.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Alice. Every time we try to protect each other, all it does is cost us more time together, and I’m not willing to lose any more. I want to be with you. Nothing else is going to matter to me more than that. Not at the end of my life. Not even now. Nothing will matter more than who I spent my time with, and I want it to be you. I need it to be you.”

“My point is, if you’re ready to tell your story, you deserve to have it told exactly how you want it to be. It needs to be yours, no one else’s. And that only works if you’re doing this with someone you completely trust. But I can promise you, if you end up wanting to write this book together, your voice will be front and center. That’s my top priority. Making sure it’s your story."

“Pretending everything’s fine only works for so long. And I don’t know. It freaks me out a little, that I could…that I could feel like this, about someone who’s good at pretending to be fine. That I could miss it, if you’re actually not. It was about me. Like you said.”

“I’ve always felt most myself when I’m alone.”

“You know, my mother was ahead of her time. The kind of woman who wanted to have it all. She knew she deserved it too. But the problem is, once you love someone, you can’t have it all anymore. Love comes with sacrifice. That’s how it works.”

“She lies to me too. For whatever it’s worth, Margaret Ives isn’t telling me the truth.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sound like a robot learning to love.”

“Sometimes I just miss this. Being close to someone. Being touched. Not just sex, I mean.”

“Inappropriate? I didn’t think so. Curious? Exceptionally, seeing as how my husband had to have passed away at least thirty years before you were even born.”

“I understood what really mattered. I understood my priorities. I understood what, in this life, was nonnegotiable for me. A lot of people don’t find that out until it’s too late. They wait to say things, and they don’t get the chance. So collecting other people’s stories, learning from their mistakes, it is a gift too. You are who you are right now in part because of what you did for Len and his family. You can’t control any of that other stuff you worry about, but you can control what you do.”

“It’s just that somehow, almost everything you say makes me want to kiss you.”

“I promise. I love touching you. I love kissing you. I love hanging out with you. I love this.”