Ash Wednesday: A Novel by Ethan Hawke

"'You're forgiven...but forgiveness is overrated. Actions have repercussions --like a science experiment, a chemical reaction.'"
(p. 52)

"'There are no secrets, just things people pretend they don't know.'"
(p. 53)

"It's easy to be gracious, tolerant, and accepting and say Everyone is equal and I wish everybody well when you get everything you want. But the real challenge is to still be this way when you don't get what you want."
(p. 96)

"'If you're not careful, ninety-eight percent of your life will be habit.'"
(p. 120)

"Oh, God, I wanted to remember every moment of my life. I didn't want to forget anything. If I could remember, then the passing seconds might have some meaning or be amassing into some definition or purpose."
(p. 147)

"It's funny. I had had this notion that when you were married you could put to rest all the insecurities and musings about whether you should really be together, but it didn't work that way. Marriage just seemed to have loaded the relationship with responsibility and fear of failure. I knew I had to stop caring whether it was a good marriage or a bad marriage, the right decision or the wrong one, and realize that it was gonna be all those things."
(p. 207)

"To believe that my life may be full of joy, laughter, and understanding fills me with so much fear of disappointment that I would prefer to smoke a cigarette and not believe at all. I either want everything to be magic and mythic or I want it to be dead. But I can't take the everyday living with small disappointments and fragile victories, the grayness of maybe-it'll-work-out and maybe-it-won't."
(p. 207)