Jennifer duBois > Quotes

“There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Learning to be an adult was learning that your best was rarely quite enough.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently?”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that way quite a bit earlier, and spent their lives waiting for their bodies to match their souls.”
― Jennifer Dubois, Cartwheel

“I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“But all that talk. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn't know any better, and he was filled the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldn't know.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“She never had to learn to live in a world that didn't necessarily want to go easy on her.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I've found can be paralyzing.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.'
'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.'
So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Maybe this had been something like the colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, before words had ushered in vision - we do not see that which we have no language to understand.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims' families--but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won't be tainted by the aggressor's sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won't be touched by the victim's pain.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.”
― Jennifer Dubois

“This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“No?” This was a matter of some interest to Lily; when she and Harold had broken up, they had solemnly vowed to stay friends. And why wouldn’t they? They were both young and resilient and had had their hearts broken two or three times already. But soon he’d taken up with a new girl—an accounting major, please!—who’d forbidden him ever to speak to Lily again. This she found crushing; she had very much wanted to stay friends with him, partly because being friends with ex-lovers seemed sophisticated and mature and continental, and partly because it seemed humane, and partly because she harbored a catastrophic fear of losing touch with anyone. It reminded her of death, and she was too easily reminded of death already. Then again, she knew that she had a more acute sense of the passage of time in general—and the swiftness of life, in particular—because of her dead sister, or almost-sister, or whatever. So she’d learned to forgive people their shortsightedness, and be happy for them that they’d lived the kinds of lives that would allow it.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Everybody should have someone whose belief in them is unwavering, unconditional, always.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“RHRC: What is your writing routine? JD: A lot of evasive maneuvering followed by ADHD multitasking interspersed with a few brief stretches of actually sitting still and writing. I would recommend this approach to no one.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports).”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“The way to assure morality on Earth was not to behave as though there was a God, even if there wasn’t—it was to behave as though there was no God, even if there was. We must act as though ours is all the judgment and forgiveness that is ever forthcoming, if we want any hope of getting anything right.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“The living always resent the claims of the dead, especially when the dead are still living.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“The trick to not killing yourself was to convince yourself, every single day, that your departure from the world would have a devastating effect on absolutely everyone around you, despite consistent evidence to the contrary.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Aleksandr said nothing, which was—along with chess—one of his great strengths in life.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel