Quotes from "A Wedding in December"

"Is imagination dependent upon experience , or is experience influenced by the imagination?" (page 33)

"If a man didn't have the courage of his convicions, was he still a good man?
But how did one define 'good'?" (page 35)

"Bridget loved Bill. Not fiercely as she loved her son. Not all consumingly as she had once loved Bill as a teenager. But, rather, solidly and knowingly, a deep undercurrent of passion and memory running below a grateful surface." (page 52)

"Of such momentary decisions, Harrison thought now, were entire unviverses constructed... (...) Chance constructions could not be undone, Harrison knew. Momentary decisions could not be disowned." (page 70)

"While the experience had been literally breathtaking fro Bridget, Bill had later said it was among the saddest moments of his life. For he had seen instantly what Bridget had been too bewildered to comprehend: the staggering sum of all the days and years they had missed together." (page135)

"A twenty-two-year marriage is a long story,( ...) it's a continuum with moments of drama, periods of stupefying boredom. Passages of tremendous hope. Passages of resignation. Once can never tell the story of a marriage. There's no narrative that encompasses it. Even a daily diary wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know. Who thought what when. Who had what dreams. At the very least, a marriage is two intersecting stories, one of which we will never know." (page151)

"One could never regret anything that led to the births of one's children: it was as axiomatic as any mathematical formula." (page 158)

"It was crap that confessing a thing relieved one of guilt, Harrison thought. How convenient to think so, how utterly deluding. Confessing a thing, he knew now, made the thing more real." (page 276)

"There are no words to describe a certain kind of pain." (page 297)


"For what was the point of fiction (...) if not to edit reality? If not to rewrite history? If not to soothe one's fevered dreams?" (page 314)