Redhead By The Side Of The Road Quotes

I'm a roomful of broken hearts

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?

Women kept the world running, really. (There was a definite difference between 'running the world' and 'keeping it running.')

you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?

It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream.

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from you. You say goodbye to your first great romance and move on to the next, but you find you have less to give to the next. A little chip of you has gone missing; you’re not quite so wholly there in the new relationship.

You didn’t think I was so great anymore,” she said. “You started finding fault with all I said; you looked bored when I was talking; you acted like everyone else in the room was more important than I was. You had stopped properly valuing me.

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from

I am the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve… You didn’t think I was so great anymore… You started finding fault with all I said...

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.

that was what happened when you were thinking of someone: every random stranger seemed to be that someone at first glance.

The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.

Some kids are raised in a mess," Ada said, "and they say, 'When I'm on my own, I'll be neater than God.' Others are raised in a mess and they say, 'Life is a mess, looks like, and that's just the way it is.' It's got nothing to do with their upbringing.

I'm a roomful of broken hearts, he tells her.

Why! he always thought to himself. What was that little redhead doing by the side of

The smells of smoke and vinegar made him hungry; all he’d had for lunch was a peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich.

He’s fully aware that old age will be coming for him too, in time. Health troubles, insurance issues, all with no hope of a pension. Even now, in his forties, he has started to feel slightly less trustful of his own body. He takes more care about how he lifts things, and he gets winded sooner on his runs. A long-ago basketball injury tends to set up a kind of echo in his left ankle during sudden changes in the weather.

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it’s almost certain nobody’s ever asked him. On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in.

Micah let a brief pause develop and then he asked what Deemolay had been up to---her most troubled, most disruptive student. Deemolay caused chaos the instant he entered the classroom, but he lived in a car with his grandmother and Micah knew Cass had a soft spot in her heart for him. Deemolay had poked a plastic ruler into Jennaya's back at lunchtime and told her it was a switchblade. That was an interesting topic.