A Partial History of Lost Causes 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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“major export is people who are funny and smart, who have advanced degrees, who read on public transportation.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

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

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

“It was the end of March, the time of year in New England when you feel yourself regaining the will to live.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“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

“He dreamed about warmth, he later thought, the way incarcerated men must dream about women.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“I yawned, which is my cover for everything.”
― Jennifer Dubois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“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

“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

“philosophy. He’s motivated by money, by self-protection, by indifference—which can be quite as dangerous as ideology.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Marriages fall apart so often, and in so many different, excruciating ways, that trying to sort out the particularities of anybody’s is like trying to unspool the proximate cause of death of a person with no immune system.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“If some people look at the complexity of the universe and see proof of God, I look at the dire complexity of that smell and see the suggestion of Satan.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“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

“But I find something compelling in the game's choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“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

“People who haven’t lost anyone think that to speak of grief is to summon it. People who haven’t grappled with their own mortality think that to speak of death is to make it real. And in my teens and twenties, most of my friends had never buried anybody who wasn’t a grandparent or a dog. So nobody asked after my father. Nobody asked after me. And sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes

“debut introduction of the bishops. Lars’s attitude toward chess was the same as his general attitude toward life: you can’t be squeamish about it. You have to embrace it, fuck with it a little, see what it will do to you. Excessive calculation leads to paralysis, which leads to death.”
― Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes