This 'n' That

Thinking and blogging about feminism, and reading Virgin Territory (which may be one of the funniest and most heartfelt books I've ever read), made me think about some other books and things I've read that had an impact on my in regards to gender and its implications on my life. So I dug through my list of quotations and "things to think about someday when I have time" and came up with the following. It's not in any particular order, and some of it is definitely more meaningful than the other. But for what it's worth, each of these struck a chord with me at some point in my life, about women or men or what they mean to each other. Enjoy.

Jill A. Davis, in Girls’ Poker Night: “That’s how it is with him. And I liked that he was nervous. That I was someone to be nervous about. At the same time, I knew something awful about myself – I knew that I needed him and that I would be absolutely crushed when this all ended and he went away.”

Prue Leith, in Leaving Patrick:
“See the mothers in the park,
Ugly creatures chiefly,
Someone must have loved them once,
In the dark, and briefly.”

Suzanne Finnamore, in Otherwise Engaged: “I feel very close to him, as though he were my right leg, or an eye.”

Suzanne Finnamore, in Otherwise Engaged: “I don’t want to miss him so much. I want to be able to turn it down. Instead I live with a rock in my heart. I walk through Paris, carrying it. Maybe this is what they mean by the ball and chain.”

John Burnham Schwartz, in Claire Marvel: “Suppose someone were to say to you: These are the happiest days of your life, right now, and they are already ending. What would you do? You might craft yourself a credo, a phrase to live by; might write the words REMEMBER THIS on an index card and tack it to the wall above your desk. You might practice meditation, seeking through the emptying of your mind that state of mindfulness in which your life with its many attendant contradictions might one day be appreciated as it is, without questions of ownership or control. You might fail miserably at this. You might turn your back on your desk and the invocation (or imprecation) on the card, on the whole static cowardly life of the desk, only to find that no other life occurs to you, that you are not fit for any other existence; and so, losing your nerve for the hundredth time, you might retreat. The card would still be there on the wall, waiting for you. And you might once again sit gazing into the wake of all your feeling, a prisoner of memory, until before too long you realize that every one of your love poems to her has become an elegy, and every elegy, a love poem.”

Sally Mandel, in Out of the Blue: “The hurt from missing him became as familiar as the feeling of air against my skin. It was always there.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay: "... if his voice be anything,
Why, shut your lids and hear him sing,
And when he wants you, take him back"

Kate Manning, in Whitegirl: “[I] was headlong. I was. Heedless. He liked that about me. I unhinged him, he said I did. I couldn’t say no, never knew my head from my heart. I wished and thought wishes were truth.“

Elaine McCreight: “It’s true that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it, as the old saying goes. But it’s also true that we often don’t know what we have been missing until it arrives.”

Jens Christian Grøndahl, in Silence in October: “In a subtle way my intellectual loneliness was the price I paid not to be lonely.”

Jens Christian Grøndahl, in Silence in October: “Eventually I stopped asking myself if I was happy. It had become unnecessary, but also futile to ask. After all, you can’t be happy all the time, gasping and salivating in one trembling spasm of happiness from the time you get up until you finally fall asleep with an idiotic smile on your wet lips.”

André Berthiaume: "We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin."

Henry Drummond: “You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.”

Michael Griffith, in Spikes: “It can be hard to tell the difference between what you feel and what you feel you ought to feel....”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria: “What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?”

Dave Barry, in Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys: “People wonder, sometimes, how come white people don’t play basketball as well as black people. The answer, I believe, is that for some reason Nature decided to concentrate all of the natural basketball ability for the entire white race for the past fifty years into Larry Bird.”

Harvey Fierstein: "Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."

Pam Houston, in Cowboys Are My Weakness: “This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”

Ethan Canin, in Carry Me Across the Water: “Without [her], he realized at that moment, he was a stranger to his own life.”

Christina Bartolomeo, in Cupid & Diana: “Childbirth is perhaps a holy experience, but like most holy experiences, I prefer that it happen to someone else.”

Christina Bartolomeo, in Cupid & Diana: “There’s something you learn once you’re over thirty. You learn that surviving is a matter of putting time between you and what hurt you, that time makes you stronger and tougher in spite of yourself. When you’re younger, people tell you this but you don’t want to believe them. When you’re older, you take consolation in the fact.”

Christina Bartolomeo, in Cupid & Diana: “You can’t choose where you belong any more than you can choose your talents or the color of your eyes. I loved Harry in the same way that I was flat-chested, the same way I hated nutmeg, the same way I’d inherited my mother’s downsloping eyelids. My lucid, consoling brain knew that I would someday find another man I would love very much, maybe more than I’d loved Harry. But the thought of that man made me feel desperately lonely for Harry. I wanted him, not some new love, not even a better love.”

Anne Lamott, in All New People: "In a way I've never quite understood, the veil tore an inch for me that day, like it does every so often, when in the midst of all that is mundane and day-to-day, there's suddenly a tiny tear in the veil, and you see the bigger brighter thing, and then the veil repairs itself, and the day goes on as before."

Anne Lamott, in Hard Laughter: “And these are the thoughts I was left with: that romance is stupid and sometimes worth it; that friendship is risky and always worth it; that I am ridiculous, and that I am not.”

Susan Minot, in Rapture: “She did the right thing and still she felt pain.”

Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees, in The Boy Next Door: “I can’t bear that [F] might be near. It makes me feel crowded in and trapped. He’s here, behind every car window, in every shop, living in my telephone receiver. Without knowing it, seeing [F] in my world has attached mine to his. I feel as if he’s hooked tendrils around everything that’s precious to me, and lifted me out of the safe world I’ve built and left me dangling, looking down at a deep, dark void.”

Jonathan Hull, in Losing Julia: “How could I have such different, incompatible sides to myself? Maybe other people are like mirrors that we see ourselves in; versions of ourselves that vary dramatically depending on the particular cut of glass. Do we marry promising images of ourselves, only to watch those images become hopelessly distorted? And what do I see now?”

Thomas Mallon, in In Fact, quoting Sinclair Lewis (in Main Street): “‘She tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms.’”

Ann Wadsworth, in Light, Coming Back: “‘Love is okay, but brings its own troubles. Me, I’m glad to be in the pasture now, not lookin’ for adventure.’”

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “No man, for any considerable time, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.”

Marion Roach: “She was losing her mind in handfuls.”

Thomas Mallon, in In Fact, quoting Howard Norman (in The Northern Lights): “‘people should not become their losses.’”

Alexander Chee, in Edinburgh: “How could he love me? There’s nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward.”

Alexander Chee, in Edinburgh: “I have to go, he says. And is gone. I sit for a while, as the heat of him disperses into the air, the stone, me. He thinks he can leave me by leaving me.”

Alexandra Thorne, in Intimate Strangers:
“‘You’ve already given me more than you could possibly know.’
“‘And what’s that?’
“‘You gave me myself.’
“A sad little smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘My mistake. I should have given you me.’”

Justin Cronin, in Mary and O’Neil: “‘Why do I love the things that no one cares about?’”

Sue Haasler, in Time After Time: “You don’t really care about your personal safety when your dreams have just been shattered.”

Michael Redhill, in Martin Sloane: “How can you help someone name an absence?”

Jeanne Ray, in Julie and Romeo: “I was lighter in that moment. I was my best self, loving and gentle and kind. It was so good to see that woman again, so good to hold another person in this way and be held. If a giant asteroid fell on us at that moment…mine would be counted as a happy life, a good life.”

Plotinus, quoted in Paul Russell, War Against the Animals: “We are what we look upon, and what we desire.”

Mary Balogh, in Slightly Wicked: “This was the night that would give light and warmth and meaning to all the rest of her days.”

Judith Kitchen, in The House on Eccles Road: “…nothing had seemed very good for the past eight years and that wasn’t really fair, was it, because there were good things but they paled beside his dreams deferred.”