When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.
Tom PerrottaSooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.
Tom PerrottaMaybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.
Tom PerrottaFrom a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.
Tom PerrottaShe told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.
Tom PerrottaMeg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.
Tom Perrotta