Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.
I wasn’t surprised to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable.
I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn’t, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn’t love them.
I have been lonely in my life but never when drinking strong coffee, wearing my fleecy slippers, and standing in my own kitchen.
Every woman’s body is an intimate landscape. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.
You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered.
But in the morning everything can, and must, be seen. Daylight takes us; it peels us like fruit.
People,” he said. “They can’t be underestimated.
She didn’t believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.
Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us.
Amelia said, “I think women – some women – regard matrimony as a highly honorable retreat from the possibility of failure in the larger world.
If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait.
Literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.
He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said – women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.
We live and we love the world, Lillian thinks, and we kid ourselves that the world loves us back.
Whitman said, ‘I am as bad as the worst but, thank God, I am as good as the best.’ You ought to spend more time with people who know how bad they are.
She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.
Every couple has the same five arguments in their lifetime, which is really just the one, over and over, until people die or divorce. What it is depends on who you are and what your parents did to you.
I don’t think people can help it. We play with fire and tell ourselves we’re just lighting a modest, necessary candle. We know discretion is called for and everything in us cries out to be seen, to spread our feathers.
I wish I’d thrown my arms around Gus’s neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.