Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Quotes

“His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly coming back and leaving again.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Children were experiments, and his had failed.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“We're creating little hedonists,' Frank used to say. 'Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They'll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“He was acting like the man he wanted to be, in hopes that he could become him. He would keep acting until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he would be the man he was.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“Chet suddenly wished she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

“There's a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers," Bea said. "It's that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they're pretty much okay, they've got a force field around them. I don't know if Jonna ever had it. I think she's always known about the bad things.”
― Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It