Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel

How could I find my way back to a moment where my life wasn’t a flood of obligations but an endless series of choices, each one designed to teach me something about existence and the world as opposed to marring me for life?

AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.

How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all?

The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.

His only thoughts about the future were how he was going to make it up to these children that they’d had to live among such grueling animosity and unhappiness, all the fighting they’d heard, the times he yelled at them when he was angry at her,

I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.

his biggest fear was to be known and rejected, and the only way he could face the rejection that comes along with being human was to never let himself be known—that way, what was rejected wasn’t him at all, but a projection of him.

It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.

I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to