Maggie Shipstead Quotes

#1. He let go, releasing her into a life of her own making.

Maggie Shipstead

#2. Ordinarily, her love affairs are entered into skittishly, sometimes reluctantly. She doesn't dive into bed but flutters in like a wayward moth.

Maggie Shipstead

#3. What do I do?' she had asked Harry. 'What do I do now? Everything is ruined. You've ruined everything.' 'That you think that," he'd said, "is exactly the problem.

Maggie Shipstead

#4. No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob's projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism.

Maggie Shipstead

#5. He finds low-level jealousy to be enlivening, pleasantly astringent.

Maggie Shipstead

#6. Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened.

Maggie Shipstead

#7. Female friendship was one-tenth prevention and nine-tenths cleanup.

Maggie Shipstead

#8. A voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere.

Maggie Shipstead

#9. Her throat is tight with fear. She is afraid of how this man, this stranger, has already changed the sensation of being alive. She is afraid he will slip away.

Maggie Shipstead

#10. She seems distracted, the way Joan feels when Harry is away on a school trip and part of her tries to follow him clairvoyantly through his day, probing the ether for any sign of distress.

Maggie Shipstead

#11. How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

Maggie Shipstead

#12. This was truly advanced WASP: how to comfort a wronged wife and mother without acknowledging any misdeeds done or embarrassment caused by loved ones.

Maggie Shipstead

#13. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation.

Maggie Shipstead

#14. When they are alone, lying quietly, he holds her the way a child holds a stuffed animal: for comfort, for security, out of a primate's urge to cling, to close one's arms around a warm, soft object.

Maggie Shipstead

#15. People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.

Maggie Shipstead