For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost.
I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I’m not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human – I only love to be so.
It’s easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy.
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
In a whisper he began begging for – and, as the sun set, received – the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
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?
Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan’s academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
You’re a library of me.
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.
This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?