FINN, A.J. - The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window

by A.J. Finn

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

Watching is like nature photography: you don't interfere with the wildlife.

Pg. 4

She never had real friends in New York; she was too shy, too small.

pg. 9

This time last year, we'd planned to sell the house, had even engaged a broker;

Pg. 12

She dropped by to tell us ("to your faces") how much she ("and my Henry") resented the arrival of "another yuppie clan" in what "used to be a real neighborhood."

Pg. 20

This past summer, his music wandered toward the house, approached my living room, knocked politely on the glass:  Let me in.  I didn't, couldn't - I never open the windows, never - but still I could hear it murmuring, pleading: Let me in. Let me in!  

Pg. 21

None of these people were my friends; most of them I'd not met more than once or twice. Urban life, I suppose.

Pg. 21

She pressed my knee to the floor.  "You're not paying me to go easy on you."

 I winced.  "Can I pay you to leave?"

Bina visits once a week to help me hate life, as I like to say.

Pg. 22

"Half the guys on these apps are using 5 year old photos," she'll complain, her waterfall of hair poured over one shoulder, "and the other half are married. And the other half are single for a reason."

That's three halves, but you don't debate math with someone who's rotating your spine.

Pg. 22

"I've never seen a black and white movie."

I make full moons of my eyes. "You're in for a treat. All the best movies are black and white."

He looks doubtful...

Pg. 44

A strip of text at the bottom of the screen reports that Granny Lizzie is typing. I wait a moment, then another; either she's whipping up a long message or it's a case of senioritis. Both my parents used to stab at the keyboard with their index fingers, like flamingos picking their way through the shallows; it took them half a minute to bash Out a hello.

Granny Lizzy: Well, hello there!

Pg. 63

I note the tone, brisk and insistently upbeat; I clock the language, informal but confident, and the precise punctuation, the infrequent errors. She's intelligent, outgoing. Thorough, too - she spells out numbers and writes by the way instead of btw, although maybe that's a function of age.

Pg. 65

Who knows what goes on in a family? I learned this as a grad student. "You can spend years with a patient and still they'll surprise you,"

pg. 98

"I may do some good before I am dead." - Jude, Part Sixth, chapter 1

Pg. 115

For an instant, and then for a moment, I'm holding my daughter again - holding her before her first day of school, holding her in the swimming pool on our vacation in Barbados, clutching her amid the snowfall. Her heart beating against my own, a beat apart,

Pg. 120

My psychotherapist oath: I must first do no harm. I will promote healing and well-being and play some others' interests above my own.

Pg. 148

And then I feel it: the warmth of the living room.

And I smell it: the stale air of my home.

And I hear it: the squeal of the cat.

Pg. 170

"I want all of you at my house. You think I'm delusional." He flinches.  "And you think I'm lying." Norelli doesn't react. "And he's saying I've never met a woman I met twice."

Pg. 181

The averted gaze, the leftward glance, the delayed response, the fidgeting - all the tells of a liar. I knew it before he opened his mouth.

The clenched jaw, though: that's a sign of something else. That's a sign of fear.

Pg. 187

Isn't it amazing," Bina says, "how according to the Internet, some people might as well not exist?"

Pg. 191

I used to log their every activity, my neighbors, used to chronicle each entrance and exit.

Pg. 197

At the top of the stairs, I take a breath. The air is stale. David's right: I should ventilate. I won't, but I should.

Pg. 233

The closet door is ajar. Just slightly, but ajar. My heart stops for an instant. But why should it? It's just an open door. I opened it myself the other day. For David. ...Except I closed it again. I would have noticed if I had been left open - because I did just notice it had been left open. I stand there, wavering like a flame. Do I trust myself?

Pg. 236

I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm doing this.

Pg. 254

So much I haven't seen in so long. So much I haven't felt, haven't heard, haven't smelled -

Pg. 256

When I emerge, scrubbed, shampooed, my skin feels new.

Pg. 350

I've been resisting Ed and Livy. Not all the time, not fully; some nights, when I hear them, I murmur back. But the conversations are over.

Pg. 425