
Broken People: A Novel

He had never loved things that much until they were
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
the best available substitute for love. How did that happen?
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
The very act of telling the story was not like photography; he didn’t know how to capture moments as they were. It was more like sculpture, starting from the raw materials of lived experience and chiseling away at it until it had revealed what he wanted to see, or what he thought the world wanted to see.
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
That elemental sense of brokenness, of being wrong, of being bad—it all lived right here in this room, like a filing cabinet, where Sam compiled the experiences that proved there was something wrong with him. All of the memories associated with the reinforcement of this belief were stored in this place. It was an evidence room.
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’
... See moreSam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
“You know, you think your pain is so monumental, but it’s actually pretty mundane. This is just normal stuff, not some great human theater. It’s what people go through.
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
And this is how I always moved through my life—trying to prove this thesis, collecting data to support my most deeply held belief, which was that I was bad.
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.
Sam Lansky • Broken People: A Novel
“Really? I think of self-loathing as being so universal. We all have so many symptoms.”