And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

— Jennifer duBois

But I find something compelling in the game's choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.

— Jennifer duBois

Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims' families--but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won't be tainted by the aggressor's sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won't be touched by the victim's pain.

— Jennifer duBois

I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.

— Jennifer duBois

It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.

— Jennifer duBois

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.

— Jennifer duBois

Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

— Jennifer duBois

Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldn't know.

— Jennifer duBois

That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

— Jennifer duBois

There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.

— Jennifer duBois