Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

My 7 highlights

• The first time Anna saw Chip Willingham, she thought that no one had ever looked more like a game-show host than this man. He was tanned and buttery, like a quality handbag; his hair had the color and rigidity of onyx; his teeth were enormous white rectangles. He gave the impression of being handsome without actually being handsome, and she could not begin to guess his age

• The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time

• Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did

• Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

• There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway

• Anna had been contemplating leaving New York for twelve years—that is to say, as long as she had lived there

• Several hours later, he had finished the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism