From The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid)
I used to know how to sleep but I have forgotten that since I picked up this book.
The first time I put this down was when I passed out reading, and the second when I finished the book. I cannot divulge the plot, so I must go into how fun it was to read. I didn’t necessarily benefit in learning about life of living from this book, but if I had to recommend published writing that was engaging, complicated, exciting, impossible to put down, intoxicating and objectively brilliant, I would recommend this in a breath shorter than the title of the book. It is astonishing to me how I barely realised I was done with the book, and the fulfilment I felt on ending it was unexpected. It is simply a fantastic fiction novel.
Some highlighted text, below:
Be wary of men with something to prove.
A MAN HITS YOU ONCE and apologizes, and you think it will never happen again.
When you’re older. You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small. OK? You promise me that?”
People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “You’re safe with me” — that’s intimacy.
I’m not suggesting that charming girls should take pity on the pretty ones. I’m just saying it’s not so great being loved for something you didn’t do.
Evelyn shakes her head. “Heartbreak is loss. Divorce is a piece of paper.”
“…force to be reckoned with.”
made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad.
Additional:
Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.
Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don’t do that.
It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.
You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small.
You wonder what it must be like to be a man, to be so confident that the final say is yours.
My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn’t gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it.
forgiveness is different from absolution.
