The Adults Quotes

“Children's lives are always beginning and adults' lives are always ending. Or is it the opposite? Your childhood is always ending and your adult self is always beginning. You are always learning how to say good-bye to whoever you were at the dinner table the night before.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“And then once in the music storage room. It was cold. The room was small with thin gray carpet and I cried after in my bed thinking of how sad the violins looked alone in the corner. It was embarrassing to have sex in front of the wrong things, especially a violin, which was so dignified at every angle”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“You know," my father said sprinkling nutmeg on his brandy Alexander, "if you sniff too much nutmeg, you could die."

"You can die from anything, really," my mother said "You can die from eating too many apricots."

"How many apricots?" I said, afraid that the World's Most Pathetic Death could happen to me.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Being an adult, it seemed, was horrible. But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant you were moving closer to death, with so much and so little to talk about all at the same time, and how was that even possible?”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“There is nothing better than this,” he said, and I worried he was right. I worried that once something had entered you, it would never leave—he would plant himself inside me and grow and grow until I was nothing but him.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“When it was real it wasn’t funny. When you touched someone, they were always with you. When his mouth was on mine, we held the same breath in the same moment, and when he was naked, his body was covered in tiny black hairs that stuck to my clothes even after I washed them. He had sowly become a part of me and when he was cruel, or cold, or acted like we couldn’t go on like this anymore it felt like he was ripping my limbs off, one at a time.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what?”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Even through all of this, sometimes I wanted to lift up her chin and say, "Don't you see that is your dog?" Don't you see how we didn't want to have to love you, Laura? Don't you see how you have to love things forever anyway, no matter if it shakes, or drools, or barks in the middle of the night, or throws up food, or dies, because even in death, he is still your dog? You picked him out of a group and said, that is my dog, and the dog you picked shakes and drools and barks in the middle of the night, but you named him. And for that reason you should never want to give him up, you should always be grateful since your dog is one of the few things in life that you actually can choose as your own.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“The neighborhood had gotten really into pastel the last few years. It started when Alfred's wife painted their whole house a soft pink during menopause. Looks Like Linen it was called. People raved. A magazine came, made the family hold up a rotisserie chicken, and then photographed it. A few months later, Mrs. Trenton's house was Mint Leaf. Ours became Celery Powder. The Resnicks' house turned Yellow Feather.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“All fathers are liars . . . If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Death was just an image, I told myself, a coming together of events in a single frame, and pain was just a part of the painting and haven't we learned our lesson? Meaning is most poignant when never fully accessed.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“I rolled the ball of muffin and I waited and after my mother said, "That you should really take a multivitamin," my father threw up his hands in disgust, and I was positive I had no family at all, certain it was not my mother but the solar wind that carried me into the universe.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“He was a man who kept only what he needed and that included me.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Mark reached out and touched my hair. I couldn't believe it. The thought of reaching out to touch him felt as criminal as reaching out to trace the lines of a Picasso painting at the MoMa.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“There was something about being in a foreign country that validated and glorified your own sense of isolation. My loneliness felt epic, and the Romanesque buildings all around me only affirmed this.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“it was only in difference that we realized whom we loved.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“Standing in front of the painting, Ester turned all her statements into questions. This bothered me, but it felt shameful to be upset about something stupid in front of something masterful. It was shameful to be this upset in general. I was twenty-two, with a college degree and long brown hair and thighs that looked more like my mother’s every day. And yet every day, it seemed, I was discovering new ways to feel fourteen again.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“There were too many things I always assumed. Too many people I tried to claim as mine. And that was wrong. If there was anything I learned when I was fourteen, it was that people were not yours.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“I thought of all the empty bottles and cigarette ends I had created and all the men I had created them with. There were so many things I had loved as my own, and these things never ended up being mine. All of the glass lights strung on other people’s porches, houseplants that were someone else’s, rugs and paintings and lighting fixtures and curtains and different men who looked different in every room, and I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the infinite ways to live a finite life. I wanted to run out of my apartment until the street signs and passing cars ripped me of my belongings, until the wind had worn me down to sand.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults

“I was quiet. Jonathan sat back down and put his head in his hands. “That’s what he was like.”

“And what were you like?” I asked.

He put his head down on the desk. “Like this,” he said, his voice muffled.

“And what was she like?”

“Smart,” he said, his head still down on the desk. “Too smart.”

“And how did she die?”

“I don’t know.”

He nervously started tapping his feet.

“You don’t know?” I asked. “What kind of answer is that?”

“I mean, I’m not sure really.”

We sat there in silence until I said, “Well, was it sudden?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very sudden. But it felt slow. It felt like it took years.”
― Alison Espach, The Adults