62 quotes found
“It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation”
“Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.”
“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
“For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?”
“It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person cou...”
“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoida...”
“She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...”
“A story is not like a road to follow it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corrido...”
“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”
“I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got...”
“I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying...”
“To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.”
“Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?”
“Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid and have it taken from you.”
“It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an...”
“Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholes...”
“Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you c...”
“Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was...”
“I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.”
“You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.”
“Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s”
“I was thinking about changing into a different sort of person than the one I am. I do think about that. I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it b...”
“We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time.”
