Swing Time: A Novel

earliest

one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.

Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors,

all of this came to seem to me effectively a form of energy in itself, a force capable of creating a dilation in time, as if she really were moving at the speed of light, away from the rest of us—stranded on earth and aging faster than her—while she looked down on us and wondered why.

Women often believe clothes will solve a problem, one way or another,

On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day.

lessons in her way of viewing

it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this world.

I saw a new idea painted on her face like fresh lipstick.