Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

someone or something had turned vodka into water. This was not my preferred kind of miracle.

like J. D. Salinger or the Unabomber.

My life, I realized, had gone wrong. Very, very wrong. I wasn’t supposed to live like this. No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right.

As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.

Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper a

at work, watching the hands tick round until five, waiting for pizza and vodka time and then Friday night and the three long sleeps until Monday.

When you’re struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people’s, to have to try and manage theirs too.

It’s quite frightening to think about the ideas that I may have absorbed from Mummy.

At the office, there was that palpable sense of Friday joy, everyone colluding with the lie that somehow the weekend would be amazing and that, next week, work would be different, better.