The Third Hotel
Laura van den Berg
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The two impulses cannot be separated. The desire to have a life and the desire to disappear from it. The world is unlivable and yet we live in it every day.”
“She could go on into infinity, and yet she understood that knowing another person was not a stable condition. Knowing was kinetic, ineffable, and it had limits, but the precise location of those limits, the moment at which the knowing stopped and the not-knowing began, was invisible. You would know you had reached the border only after you had surpassed it.”
“She might have said, I am not who you think I am. She might have said, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality.”
“It was brutal, the mortality contract. It came for everyone and no one was prepared.”
“Death could make a person feel righteous in a way they had no right to be. Nothing in the world was less personal and nothing felt more like a poison arrow sent straight for your heart.”
“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Clare said, with bitterness. What doesn't kill you leaves you alive, Richard countered. She spat water onto the floor. What doesn't kill you only leaves you feeling broken and insane.”
“There were three sides to a marriage: public and private and who-fucking-knows, one lived and one performed and one a thundering mystery.”
“Something she and her husband had in common but rarely discussed was the absence of a desire for children, to fill their home with people besides themselves. It was a silent agreement, felt rather than spoken, and in her experience the soundest agreements were the ones that did not require the reassurances of language. Therefore this line of questioning was the inverse of what she usually fielded, since a childless married woman in her thirties was so often regarded, by men and women alike, as a puzzle or a pity. What's the story here? people would ask, inquests designed to make women like her suspect there was something malformed inside, blinding them to the hideous reality of their choice.”
“She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.”
“My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner. Okay, said Clare. They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn't be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety.”
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Book Keywords:
disappearance, death, public-life, women, danger, safety, private-life, choices, abnormality, loss, marriage, living, life, children, mortality, grieving, mystery, grief, childlessness, mourning, relationships, self-righteousness
