Claire Lombardo > Quotes

“The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“It’s funny,” her mom continued. “I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Maybe another person couldn’t irrevocably save you, but they could sometimes calm you down, and that felt like an exquisitely magical thing.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Everyone thinks I know what I’m doing but I actually have no idea what I’m doing and that’s the cruelest trick the universe plays on people who have their shit together, little one; the people who seem like they have it together are the most overlooked, because everyone thinks those people never need anything, but everyone needs things; I need things; thanks for listening;”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“And there was something indescribably lovely about this, the baby who’d once jabbed with restless knees at your internal organs sitting beside you on a park bench and benevolently giving you shit, and it occurred to her that it was moments like these that made being alive feel worth it, little blips of contentment amid the mayhem and status quo.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Nobody’s ever prepared to care for a child full-time, is what I mean. Nobody understands what that means until they do it for themselves. We’re all just holding our breath and hoping nothing catastrophic happens. And how deeply you get hurt doing that! It’s constant pain. It’s a parade of complete and utter agony, all the time, forever.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“It endeared him to her. How she loved him, missed him, wanted to kill him. If someone asked her to poetically describe her marriage, she would articulate that particular feeling, one of simultaneously wanting him pressed against her and also on another continent”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“And it was striking, how much less alone that could make you feel, because of course to be peopled at all was a high-order gift, but to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“This is the problem with you,” she said finally. “You’re so nice until you’re not. And then you’re the biggest asshole on the planet.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“And this was what worried her the most: nothing had ever felt as comfortable, as easy, as good as being with her parents, her family. No one, it seemed, would ever regard her with the same enthusiastic awe as her mother; the same quiet, feverish pride as her father. It aroused concern within that she was slated for a lifetime of disappointment from the outside.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“And he realized, then, how silly it seemed that you could ever know another person—really know her—and how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was like to be her, day after day.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“You were right,” she said. “Thanks,” he replied. “About what?” “About the fact that we’re never going to—you know. Reach the finish line. With the kids. There’s always going to be something.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Pregnancy was the cruelest evolutionary fuck-you, filling you with more anxiety than you’d ever experienced in your life while prohibiting you from imbibing anything that might calm your nerves.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number of times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?”
“It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“It takes such a long time to realize that it’s worth it. I wonder why we’re engineered that way. We’re sleep-deprived to the point of madness those first couple of years and then one day you wake up and you see the little person you’ve created and she says a sentence to you and you realize that everything in your life has been an audition for the creation of that specific person. That you’re sending freestanding beings off into the world and it’s entirely on your shoulders.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“He’s sorry. He’s embarrassed. He’s hungry. The Catholic trifecta. You’ve taught him well.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Life was never going to be what she wanted it to be, and she'd decided to pragmatically lower her bar in a way that would have horrified her teenage self.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“I wish I could take it all away from you sweet thing. Her mom said simply. It was a strange sentence. Darkly poetic. One that with a subtle shift in vocal inflection could have been a curse instead of a sweet proclamation of motherly selflessness.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“But that was the thing: sometimes being a sister meant knowing the right thing to do and still not doing it because winning was more important.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“I think we allow ourselves to hurt the people we love the most because we know they won’t abandon us.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“It’s a strange feeling to have as a kid, like you’re responsible for your parents’ happiness,” she’d said to him, surprising herself with how frankly she was able to describe the way it felt to be the daughter of her parents. He’d been an attentive audience. “Not that you’re the cause of it, but instead that there’s some obligation on your part to ensure it. I didn’t really realize until recently that that wasn’t normal.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“How could you grow people inside your own body, sprout them from your own extant materials, and suddenly be unable to recognize them?”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Marilyn had gone to yoga while pregnant with Grace, had adjusted the household bedtime so she got enough sleep, had choked down the vitamins she’d evaded the first three times around. And what did any of it matter anymore, really, because Grace was smoking on the roof just like the other kids had done, having just undulated her way back home on the waves of a major lie.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he has been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“And it was weird, she thought, feeling adult and aware, how a thing so terrible as losing someone could yield goodness in the ones who were left.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“He felt the heat blasting from the vents of the Jeep and he gave a lot of grateful thought to the fact that he was finally in a comfortable enough place to fall asleep, not driving a stolen car and not sleeping in said stolen car in a copse of trees in twelve-degree weather; not in an unfamiliar bed that smelled like someone else; not in the series of try-hard cots in the Interim Room at Lathrop House but instead in the soft bucket seat of a Jeep that smelled like someone he knew; homeward bound, God what a queer thing to say but he hardly had the wherewithal to correct himself, so heavy were his eyelids, his head full of newfound knowledge, his belly full of egg rolls, and he didn’t even notice falling asleep; he just drifted off, Wendy to his left, because he knew, somehow, that she’d get them home.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had