Some books are so good, you feel compelled to write down every other paragraph, just to make sure you don’t forget the little literary gems. Below are some of my favorite quotes and sections from Bridget Asher’s The Pretend Wife.
“I saw you through the plate-glass window of the ice-cream shop. I was walking by and I saw you standing there, in line. It was like a vision and I stopped dead and my heart was pounding. I can’t explain it, but it felt suddenly like I’d been looking for you everywhere for years, but I didn’t know it. And then I found you. And I was wondering what to do – not about whether or not to go in but instead, I don’t know, I think I was standing there waiting to figure out what kind of person I am.” p.126
“It was like returning to myself – as if I’d been lost so long I forgot I was lost, gone so long I forgot I had a home once, but then found myself walking around a familiar corner, saying to myself, I remember this place.” p.144
” ‘We’re just bones and stuff.’
‘But there’s more to us than that…we’re imagination and love and dreams. Aren’t we?’” p. 147
“We seem to think that things in life are clearly labeled as right and wrong, as if the world’s been divided up by someone with a giant ink pad and two rubber stamps……but this theory sells life short. The world isn’t that simple, and the labels of right and wrong, if they exist at all, get smeared to the point of illegibility. And then where are you?” p.163
“I knew that I wanted something from her. I’d recognize you anywhere. I wanted her to say those words again or something, anything, that would make me feel like I’d been found. How long had I felt like a child lost at the beach holding a pail that knocked against her legs, disoriented by family after family huddled under beach umbrellas?” p.175
“I had a good life and Peter was a good man, and who was I to want more? Did I feel like I deserved more than that? I didn’t believe in being entitled to the good life. Life was life. It handed out its sorrows randomly. You took what you got and you found something in it to be thankful for – that was your job as a human being.” p.180-181
“He got up then and hugged me. It was a great big bear hug that tipped me almost completely off the ground. It was so big that I felt like I was made of air, like I was just a little girl. It wasn’t the hug of someone who gave love in small doses – but more like someone who’d chosen not to live that way anymore. I felt like I’d gotten something returned to me, something lost so long ago I didn’t even really know it had once existed, but it felt right and good and mine.” p.268
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