Best 22 quotes of Rebecca Makkai on MyQuotes

Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.

Asher said, "Does it really ever go anywhere?" "Does what?" "Love. Does it vanish?" Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself stead whenever Asher braked suddenly. "I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn't it?" Asher said, "I think that's the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

Cecily said, "That's the difference between optimism and naivety. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven't been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it." Richard said, "All belief is a trick.

[E]scaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn't save themselves. ~ "The Worst You Ever Feel

He wanted to spend the rest of his life building Nora's Paris out of sugar cubes, brick by brick. He wanted a one-way ticket to 1920. He thought about Nora's idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn't what she'd meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed.

History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end. ~ "The Briefcase

If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.

If there was a common thread between the great warriors and runaways of my Hulkinov ancestors, and my father the pathological expatriate, and me, it was just that: hotheaded self-righteousness. And not the bad kind, either. We actually were right. We just cared more about being right than doing what was right. And we cared more about being right than about our own lives.

I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.

She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.

She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it's true. Not that they had bad intentions, just...you always want to believe you're important in someone's life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren't.

The thought came to Yale, as Dr. Cheng listened to his lungs, that this could be the man presiding over his final days. That in walking through his door, he'd potentially chosen a partnership more permanent than any other in his life. Till death do us part.

- the way a person could change, and yet you couldn't let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.

The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.

We never let go of that,' Cecily said. 'I mean, even for parents - that's never not your baby, you know?' "I think you're right." As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people--of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they'd ever represented, every promise.

We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?" ~ "The Museum of the Dearly Departed

You should know we had so much joy as well! But when you build a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don't they.