Jennifer DuBois Quotes & Sayings

Learning to be an adult was learning that your best was rarely quite enough. — Jennifer DuBois

Major export is people who are funny and smart, who have advanced degrees, who read on public transportation. — Jennifer DuBois

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

It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility. — Jennifer DuBois

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time. — Jennifer DuBois

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

The things that go wrong are rarely the things you've thought to worry about. — Jennifer DuBois

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.'
'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.'
So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments
chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life. — Jennifer DuBois

That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. '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. — Jennifer DuBois

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all. — Jennifer DuBois

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

The ability to communicate scorn should be the true test of fluency in any language. — Jennifer DuBois

Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always. — Jennifer DuBois

She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling — Jennifer DuBois

She'd said "died" as a courtesy to him - nobody in her family could stand people who said "passed away" - but — Jennifer DuBois

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

Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims' families
but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won't be tainted by the aggressor's sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won't be touched by the victim's pain. — Jennifer DuBois

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

She never had to learn to live in a world that didn't necessarily want to go easy on her. — Jennifer DuBois

Do you ever feel that way, though?" "What way?" "Like you could go back to some time that's passed? Like you catch yourself thinking, why don't I go there anymore, and why don't I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it's because that life is gone? And that you can't? — Jennifer DuBois

There wasn't a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our formers selves had ever done. — Jennifer DuBois

Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment. — Jennifer DuBois

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

Maybe this had been something like the colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, before words had ushered in vision - we do not see that which we have no language to understand. — Jennifer DuBois

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

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

He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that way quite a bit earlier, and spent their lives waiting for their bodies to match their souls. — Jennifer DuBois

The way to assure morality on Earth was not to behave as though there was a God, even if there wasn't - it was to behave as though there was no God, even if there was. We must act as though ours is all the judgment and forgiveness that is ever forthcoming, if we want any hope of getting anything right. — Jennifer DuBois

But it was one thing to know that your privilege was unearned; it was another thing entirely to feel that your sadness was, too - to have to be so pitifully glad, so pitifully sorry, for the modest perks of a dull and diligent middle-class life (TV, and Target candles, and a trip to Six Flags every year). — Jennifer DuBois

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

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

I yawned, which is my cover for everything. — Jennifer DuBois

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

We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose. — Jennifer DuBois

The trick to not killing yourself was to convince yourself, every single day, that your departure from the world would have a devastating effect on absolutely everyone around you, despite consistent evidence to the contrary. — Jennifer DuBois

He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports). — Jennifer DuBois

This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own. — Jennifer DuBois