Melissa Bank

“You can feel like he wants to own you,-not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having.”

“They were a couple in a way that didn't exclude anyone but seemed superior to every other relationship in the room.”

“It occurred to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace.”

“It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband's cheating on her, but not if you're the woman and it's your husband.”

“I'd already figured out that not understanding my failings was another one of my failings.”

“No," he said, and he snapped his fingers. "You'll come work for me at K----. And be a real associate editor."I said, "I could bring you up on charges for that.""What?""Work harassment in the sexual place.”

“When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.”

“You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.”

“I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.”

“'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.”

“Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into cab, every runner along the river,every motorcycle coming and going.”

“I live by Edith Wharton's rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.”

“Up until that moment, I'd been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he'd keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.”

“Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you've ever met.”

“You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy.It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.”

“But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.”

“Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.”

“There are things that two people say in the middle of the night That don't make sense to a third at breakfast.”

“Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.”