Extreme

Joan Gelfand

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Seven-thirty. Time. Time is a Mobius strip. Coding. Working. Training. An endless ribbon of activity; iterations, pushing, perfecting. Doug heads for his car, not sure why he is leaving, or, where he is going.”

“What do you do in your spare time?” Arthur asks. What is it with this guy? Hope flinches, feeling less like she’s been interviewed and more like she’s been whiplashed. The spare time question was code for questions, you were, by law, not allowed to ask. Did she read books to sick kids? Find housing for the homeless? Support underprivileged women to build careers? Did she have a demanding husband? Two kids under five? And aging mother? But Hope had never put down stakes, either in the home or the do-good camp. Where she came from, at the end of a workweek, a person deserved a cold beer and some down time. “What spare time?”

“At the moment, sitting in his idling car under a rustling sycamore on a cool evening in front of Hope’s apartment seems not only perfectly normal, but a good idea. He hasn’t sat outside of a girl’s house since he was what? Fifteen? Except that he wasn’t married then.”

“You would never know by looking at them, but Hope’s lips are the softest, juiciest, most kissable lips ever. She thinks there’s nothing special, just like she thinks that most of her outstanding features are standard operating equipment, but someday, Doug will tell her—hers are the lips men kill for. Hope’s smell and her body are familiar and unfamiliar at once—like a whisper or a dream. Her back is more muscular, her arms thinner than he remembers. None of it matters. He loved her then and he loves her now.”

“Old boy gravitas oozes from his body like the peaty scent of Scotch from wood paneled rooms. Still, there’s enough of a bad boy glint in his eyes to know that he would shoot you the finger across the board room table if he objected to your business plan.”

“Hope sits across the table from the man she’s thought about, grappled with, left without saying why, and taken on an imaginary roller-coaster ride of her shape-shifting emotions for the past three years. She’s not sure working with him is a good idea.”

“Doug sees beneath all of her Hope-ness. Her sees her all the way to her white-hot rage, and her fear. What Doug doesn’t see, is that most of the time, it’s much to bear, and that really, when everything is stripped away, she is just as scared as what life dishes up as the next person, that inside she is that Swarovski hummingbird displayed so innocently on her credenza, all light-reflecting surfaces and fragile as glass.”

“He’ll head home. Call Jared, and then Hope. If he’s going to go back to work, if he’s going to give up his dream of being a rock star, he needs to find out where lightning is going to strike next.”

“Jeff’s office looks like a cross between the overnight camping trip of a preternaturally rambunctious Boy Scout troop and an X-rated pajama party for a sect of animals for which there is no genus. What it smells like is more easily recognizable – dried-out pizza, stale beer and sweat.”

“How can she explain that this is not about him? It’s about her. About the whole package of being James’ wife. One day, she told herself, she would try; she would be a good wife. The next, she knew that she never could. The idea of domestic bliss made her anxious, sad. She knew she would pick fights; she would find fault; she would be restless. She would blow it because that was who she was. She was more at home with chaos than comfort, more at ease when things were unsettled. She couldn’t blame him; he thought he could fix her.”

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Book Keywords:

novel-writing, drama, fiction, excitement, rush, lies, love, behind-the-scenes, truth, fiction-writing, deciet, novel, insight, fiction-novel