Quotes from work

On Beauty

“I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.”

“Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.”

“This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.”

“She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon… and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.”

“He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”

“She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.”

“Each couple is its own vaudeville act.”

“Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?”

“Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”

“They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.”

“He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.”

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

“Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.”

“In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.”

“Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.”

“It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy”

“I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.”

“He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was alsoblood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like”

“The future's another country, man… And I still ain't got a passport.”