But just then, to my immense surprise, I thought I understood what he saw in her, aside from that amazing body. It was something that had never occurred to me before: she was unhappy. On stage that afternoon, this simple fact struck me with the unmistakable force of truth. Tracy Flick needed someone to cheer her up. So did Lisa, now that I though about it; so did Tammy and my mother and father. Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish..."

• byronbache
• December 29, 2009
• Election
• Page 137
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Nick was always a favourite with Mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments toward which it would always twitch and bend.

• byronbache
• July 19, 2009
• The Line of Beauty
• Page 152
• Reply