Cleopatra and Frankenstein

They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”

but I could tell she felt safe in that house. She grew up feeling safe and fiercely loved.”

Their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires.

He wanted his mother, not his actual mother, that self-involved drunk, but his real mother, still unfound, the woman who could truly take care of him. He wanted Eleanor.

She loved New York, but it was not her city, she knew that now.

Cleo and Frank could not make each other happy, no matter how hard they’d tried.

“Sweetheart, love is humiliating. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”
“Who would have told me that?”
“Do you know the word humiliate comes from the Latin root humus, which means ‘earth’? That’s how love is supposed to feel.”
“Like hummus?”
“Like earth. It grounds you. All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It should hold you like the earth.”

“People are like this too, you know,” he says eventually. “We break. We put ourselves back together. The cracks are the best part. You don’t have to hide them.”

She was the one in her twenties, she wanted to remind him. He and Frank were in their forties. They had the careers. They had the money. They had the citizenship, the stability, the power. In comparison, she had nothing but herself.

“I guess … well, when you’re an actor you can kind of be both seen and not seen at the same time. You’re speaking, but not your own words. You express feelings, but not your own feelings, or at least not usually. You can play a character without being judged by your own character. It’s freeing, you know? Freedom from being yourself.”