Jennifer duBois > Quotes

“The city had seemed grand to him once ... it had once had a certain clarity. When you're young you think it's the clarity that's intoxicating; later you realize you were only ever drunk on your own vision.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Dying for two decades takes something away from life, but it takes something away from death, too.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“underslept and vaguely hostile.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Sending them was like sending a probe to Mars—he thought of its insect legs folding up into a squat, its motorized head casting this way and that. You could program it to do what you wanted, but it was no replacement for going there yourself and flinging your fingers into the red sand.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“She’d said “died” as a courtesy to him—nobody in her family could stand people who said “passed away”—but”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“He regarded Communism as a kind of collective benign lie, like the universal agreement among human beings to rarely discuss the fact that everybody would one day die.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“That’s all anybody wanted anyone to know about them—how hard it all had been, how valiantly they had tried, how much unseen credit they were due.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“Tyruil being, in the tradition of all academics, simultaneously bellicose and extremely prone to personal offense—”
― Jennifer duBois, The Last Language

“And it’s only when you see how young you once were that you become, in your own mind, old.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“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. But it’s a useful thing to learn, you know, if you can manage not to feel too sorry about it.”
― Jennifer duBois, Cartwheel

“He shouldn’t be surprised that the inevitable was often the worst thing; worse, even, for the fact that it had been etched so long ago, that it was an ending that had predated its own characters.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes