Цитаты из книг — Чед Харбах

People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.

She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.

You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.

Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it's just me: a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed for millennia - and I get choked up because somebody tells me I'm good at washing dishes.

The check proved that she'd been alive these weeks, that she'd accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn't need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

Affenlight smiled. This was the thought that had been eluding him, the little switch deep in his head that needed to be flipped to restore him from his vague fears to his actual physical life: after sex, after oral sex, with your saintly lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old male…

All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream…

Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted…

There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.

You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul - not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.

Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisaical side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.

He already new he could coach. All you have to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish somebody would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphisized the obstacles that could prevent him from…