Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.
I mention all this so that you will understand that is part of the process: once you’ve found out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.
That’s what a marriage is... Pieces break off, and you glue them back on.
I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.
It occurred to me that if I stayed in bed much longer, I would be forced to watch a soap opera. That seemed redundant, so I got up and went to group.
Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century.
We’d grown up in an era when no one was divorced, and suddenly everyone was divorced.
Is what you think interesting enough to make the reader care? Are you saying something that no one has said? Above all, do you understand that you are not as important as what you’re covering?
And then it hit me: he doesn’t love me. It hit me with a shimmering clarity: that was all there was to it. It didn’t matter if he was crazy. It didn’t matter if I was innocent or guilty. Nothing mattered except that he didn’t love me. If I throw this pie at him, he will never love me. But he doesn’t love me anyway. So I can throw the pie if I want to. I picked up the pie and thanked God for the linoleum floor, and threw it.
I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can’t believe I’m here without her.
We all have stories like that, stories we rely on to establish our charm in the beginning of relationships.
Jonathan never takes anything personally; he always sees himself as a statistical reflection of a larger trend in society.
Men,” he said as he left. “I hate them. I’ve always hated them. You wonder why I always hang around with women and never with men, it’s because men do things like this.” He waved his hand vaguely at me and my stomach and jogged off into the night.
The truth is that if my father weren’t my father, he would be one of the men he hates; he is incorrigibly faithless and thoroughly narcissistic, to such an extent that I tend to forget he’s also capable of being a real peach.
All beginnings are intrinsically happy.
At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin. This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.
When you want them to die, they never do.
It’s hopeless. I know that, but I never really get it. I go right on. I think to myself: I was wrong about the last one, but I’ll try harder to be right about the next one.
People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s. I have the paperback copy I read at the time, and it’s dog-eared, epiphany after epiphany marked so that I could easily refer back to them. Does anyone read The Golden Notebook nowadays? I.
I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.