Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition,

the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible.

he can’t or won’t specify his needs, being convinced that he is always in debt and on probation,

it turns out he’s the kind of guy who’s only fully engaged when she’s talking about her pain, who subtly steers conversations in that direction, because it furnishes an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring.

Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.

he doesn’t want pity; he wants not to need it.

he looks like he reads Architectural Digest but will also tap it on your tongue

he’s giving “my parents own a Cape Cod summer home that’s older than America”

In them she has found something like the coterie to which she’s always wanted to belong, not the popular crowd, rather, the smaller satellite crowd that makes fun of the popular crowd—the outer circle, internally supportive and externally terrifying.