J. Ryan Stradal Quotes

#1. Fiona and Jarl had gotten engaged a few weeks before, on Black Friday. Jarl thought they could get a better deal on rings that way.

J. Ryan Stradal

#2. And she would pray for guidance, but she wouldn't ask the Lord forgiveness for swearing at her husband. That was gonna stand for now.

J. Ryan Stradal

#3. Braque was used to this kind of crap; her mom had been a master choreographer of anxious micromanagement since Braque could remember.

J. Ryan Stradal

#4. She suddenly felt sorry for these people, for perverting the food of their childhood, the food of their mothers and grandmothers, and rejecting its unconditional love in favor of what? What? Pat did not understand.

J. Ryan Stradal

#5. God made her a giving person, and even in this house of people who could be so hateful and hard, her one skill, she knew, was to serve them and make them happy, the way even an unwatered tree still provides whatever shade it can.

J. Ryan Stradal

#6. Even though she had an overbite and the shakes, she was six feet tall and beautiful, and not like a statue or a perfume advertisement, but in a realistic way, like how a truck or a pizza is beautiful at the moment you want it most.

J. Ryan Stradal

#7. With a dog, it's almost like having a kid." "No, it's not like having a kid," she said. "It's preferable in every possible way. That makes it like having a dog.

J. Ryan Stradal

#8. She hated those boys and knew that they were stupid and hence their opinions were baseless and the impact of their lives on the planet would be measured only in undifferentiated emissions of methane and nitrates . . . but still.

J. Ryan Stradal

#9. Girls were lucky, they didn't have to have a thing. They just had to look nice and come to your shows and not call you all the time about stupid stuff.

J. Ryan Stradal

#10. already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family, and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope, with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.

J. Ryan Stradal

#11. To Eva, Cousin Randy was an untouchable demigod - an angel's wing broken from an ancient statue, sent here to help her hover above all things insipid and heartbreaking.

J. Ryan Stradal

#12. As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the Economist - she saved her smarter reading for public situations - when

J. Ryan Stradal

#13. When it came to Eva's life, her mom had the awareness of a fifty-cent guppy; there were sad-eyed janitors at school who seemed to have more insight into Eva's heart than her own parents did.

J. Ryan Stradal

#14. She looked like a shorter, wider Hillary Clinton, but with the posture and attitude of someone fifty-eight hours into a sixty-hour workweek.

J. Ryan Stradal

#15. What he would tell her instead, he hadn't yet decided, but now was not the time to think about such things. Now was the time to sit with his little family of two people, and cry.

J. Ryan Stradal

#16. Still, he had been a charismatic, talented scoundrel who almost certainly was on to a new woman after a week in Japan; there was nothing to long for or feel sorry for.

J. Ryan Stradal

#17. It all looks the same in the toilet the next morning...

J. Ryan Stradal

#18. After decades away from the Midwest, she'd forgotten that bewildering generosity was a common regional tic.

J. Ryan Stradal

#19. Eva knew that her mom hadn't gotten the vegan sorbet because it was too expensive. In their home, cost was the main reason why something good didn't happen.

J. Ryan Stradal

#20. When Lars first held her, his heart melted over her like butter on warm bread, and he would never get it back. When mother and baby were asleep in the hospital room, he went out to the parking lot, sat in his Dodge Omni, and cried like a man who had never wanted anything in his life until now.

J. Ryan Stradal

#21. His love for her made her feel like she was wearing sunglasses even when she wasn't.

J. Ryan Stradal

#22. Have you been in a canoe?" "Anywhere where two people can fit, they can have sex. It's the law.

J. Ryan Stradal

#23. There were Lolo McCaffrey's thick braids and patchouli-oil smell, crouched down by the nutritional bars, her moon face staring at the label of a Clif Bar like someone who can't read.

J. Ryan Stradal

#24. hadn't grown into being a woman, she had become a woman with an exclamation mark, the sort of hardy feminine brute of the Pleistocene from which all women, great and frail, are descended.

J. Ryan Stradal

#25. Where did you source your ingredients from?" one of them asked. "Are they local?" "Yeah," Pat said, "they're from the store about a mile from my house." One of the girls behind the table laughed. "Sorry," she said.

J. Ryan Stradal

#26. Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.

J. Ryan Stradal

#27. What an honor to live in a part of the world that loves good old-fashioned baking.

J. Ryan Stradal

#28. They were generous in the way of people running a garage sale who give things away to the folks who come at the end.

J. Ryan Stradal

#29. Dormitories are even cooler than I thought they would be," Eva said. "They're like a prison, but the sex is worse," Braque said.

J. Ryan Stradal

#30. if one day, that woman would seek her out, and for whatever balance of time, Cindy would have a daughter again. For now, she would return to her kitchen, wash the plate, the cup, and the fork, and just live in the world she had created, the world where the two of them existed, and nothing more.

J. Ryan Stradal

#31. What people don't understand about deer is that they're vermin. They're giant, furry cockroaches. They invade a space, reproduce like hell, and eat everything in sight.

J. Ryan Stradal

#32. It made hot girls forget you were a dork, which is the point of all music.

J. Ryan Stradal

#33. She's told me that even though you won't meet her tonight, she's telling you her life story through the ingredients in this meal, and although you won't shake her hand, you've shared her heart. Now please, continue eating and drinking, and thank you again.

J. Ryan Stradal