Matthew Thomas Quotes

#1. what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren't they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He'll be in good hands.

Matthew Thomas

#2. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life.

Matthew Thomas

#3. The little sedimentary deposits of his need had piled at her feet until they blocked her view of him.

Matthew Thomas

#4. He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.

Matthew Thomas

#5. He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He'd been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

Matthew Thomas

#6. ...he had impressed her as a man delightfully open to suggestion, with an imagination large enough to find time, even in the depths of despair, for the important things in life, those accidents without which our existence was little more than a schedule of dry routines.

Matthew Thomas

#7. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren't that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they'd been had found release through a necessary valve.

Matthew Thomas

#8. There were places, she now saw, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did. Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were.

Matthew Thomas

#9. For now, while he breathed and moved, while he felt and thought, there was still, between this moment and the one of his dying, the interval allotted to him, and there was so much to live for in it . . .

Matthew Thomas

#10. She saw that he couldn't live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered.

Matthew Thomas

#11. The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn't enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She

Matthew Thomas

#12. This was life; you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn't a love story?

Matthew Thomas

#13. The point wasn't always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well.

Matthew Thomas

#14. The world of adults seemed to budget for the carelessness of children.

Matthew Thomas

#15. Negative thoughts back you into a corner," her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. "They multiply and surround you. Don't think of what you don't have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.

Matthew Thomas

#16. The kids who thought of snappy things on the spot never had to worry about being fat or smart or pussies. You had to have a little meanness in you to do it. You had to be willing to embarrass other people sometimes.

Matthew Thomas

#17. Don't ever love anyone," her mother said, picking the papers up and sliding them into the bureau drawer she'd kept her ring in. "All you'll do is break your own heart.

Matthew Thomas

#18. You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved.

Matthew Thomas

#19. She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.

Matthew Thomas

#20. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn't to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.

Matthew Thomas

#21. Life is going to give you things to be angry at. I don't want you to be consumed by that anger or forget how much you're capable of.

Matthew Thomas

#22. Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.

Matthew Thomas

#23. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions.

Matthew Thomas

#24. She wondered if she'd taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it.

Matthew Thomas

#25. He threw all his affection at them and hoped that some of it would stick, maybe even come back to him, though if it didn't he gave it anyway; he gave it more, even, because everyone had something that needed to come out.

Matthew Thomas