Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Those have to be the saddest words a person can utter.”
“What?”
“‘That’s just who I am.’”
“Why?”
“Because it shows a total unwillingness to change. That is not just who you are, Frank. It’s who you’ve become, who you choose to be. You just refuse to acknowledge the choice.”

wanted to be married to you. I wanted you to be enough. I wanted to be surprised by you every day.”

They ate because they felt less alone when eating. Because they wanted to feel full, then wanted to feel nothing.

What must it be like to be so unselfconscious in one’s body?

“I think she’s struggling.”
“She’s an artist. She’s always struggling.”

“She was an artist, like you. With a—I don’t know how to say this well—an ego that is large but self-esteem that is small?”

“You owe yourself the same care you give to others.”

She had been living too long in Frank’s false world. She thought she would find security there, but she had not.

course she couldn’t have been happy with Anders. She couldn’t imagine herself being happy with anyone.

She thought of a song her mother used to play, a woman singing plaintively about wishing for a river to skate away on … How true that feeling was. Her mother had felt it; now she did too. That was the real inheritance from her mother, she thought, more defining than any facial feature or mannerism. They both wanted to disappear.