Same As It Ever Was Quotes

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

“It can be hard to tell, in the suburbs, whether an eccentrically clad woman carrying around a single organic cabbage is nomadic or expensively disheveled.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“The dog whines, and Julia leans down and lifts her up. “Don’t cry,” she says into Suzanne’s fur. “You shouldn’t police her emotions,” Alma says, but then, frowning, asks, “Are you okay?” It’s a rare display of interpersonal concern as far as Alma goes, and Julia wishes for a second that she weren’t okay, that she could call upon her daughter for some kind of nontraumatic assistance, splinter removal or a dislocated shoulder, something that would require close bodily contact with this person she’s borne, so long as Alma is—such a rarity from her narcissistic lioness—offering. As it is, there isn’t a way to navigate deftly. To allude to something physiological will make her daughter (who doesn’t particularly enjoy her parents’ live presence but also doesn’t want them dead) suspicious and to tell the truth—that she’d been steeling herself for an encounter with her husband following an encounter with the woman who’d almost ended their marriage—is obviously out of the question.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“You’ve progressed beyond her understanding,” he says. “Our kids are always, one day, going to progress beyond our understanding; don’t you think?”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Where did you meet this person?” she asks, eyes closed. “Oh,” Ben says, and something about the note it hits spikes her anxiety again, makes her worry about some sort of sex cult or Pentecostal conversion; she decides she’d rather he be Boo Radley than have met a woman at Bible study. He seems uncomfortable. “Around—campus.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“intensity.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“Because Mark was wearing a tie and had a master's degree, and because Julia's woes were frequently foregrounded in dealings with Duplo architecture and coerced carrot consumption, Mark was more vocally allowed to rue his responsibilities; that was just the way the world worked.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“My habits are normally normal, Mom. My whole life is normal, despite your best efforts.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“she feels familiar old defenses rising up, trying to stop them. An older iteration of herself trying to protect the current one.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“the anomalous outlier who’s never quite fit but wedged herself in anyway, all those years ago, and is, somehow, still here.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was