The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics)

by Elaine Dundy

I’d made a vow when I got over here never to speak to anyone I’d ever known before.

I don’t suppose there is anything on earth to compare with a French student café in the late morning. You couldn’t possibly reproduce the same numbers, noise, and intensity anywhere else without producing a riot as well.

I’ve never wanted to meet anyone I’ve been introduced to.

I felt a vague, melancholy sensation running through me, not at all unpleasant.

I mean, how many things can you concentrate on at once anyway?

I can’t understand it. I have quite a lot of clothes and go to quite a lot of places. I never actually seem to be wearing the right things at the right time, though. You’d think the law of averages . . . . Oh well. It’s all very discouraging.

I gave up wondering if anyone was ever going to understand me at all. If I was ever going to understand myself even. Why was it so difficult anyway? Was I some kind of a nut or something? Don’t answer that.

He was no match for my American callowness.

For no reason at all, I was in the middle of a black depression.

I turned off the lights and lay back in the darkness, tired but wide-awake, sleepy but unsleepy, too sleepy to read, not sleepy enough to sleep, my eyelids pinned back from my eyes, my spine rigid.

If you want to know what I really thought of her—I thought she was a great, affected, mindless, maudlin, screeching cow.

What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me?

What was I getting so worked up about? The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

On the whole they were a disreputable bunch of revelers, working on the assumption that every day was their birthday or some such equally weak assumption, and their virtues were largely negative.

I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.

After a show opens it doesn’t belong to the director any more, it’s the stage manager’s baby,

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

I’m sure there are some people, some basic country types, who bring the whole countryside into wherever they’re living as easily as some city types do the same thing the other way around.

They approved of both of us; and they approved of people whom they approved of choosing their lovers from other people they approved of within the circle. White of ’em.

I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

I suppose it simply doesn’t occur to some people that one might be trying to recover from the night before.”

What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy snap and it all seems so once-over-again?

How many things have I ever done well in my life? Done really well? Done wholly with all my attention and concentration focused on the doing? None.

What you can’t stand is the whole new young adventurous floating population with either just a little money or no money at all, no jobs, nothing, just a desire maybe to see the world awhile. Then all the jealousy and envy in your mournful little unfulfilled life rises up inside you and you have to invent all sorts of dark sinister motives for everyone.

You’ve got so entangled in your cloak you keep stabbing yourself with your own dagger!

That one generation cannot ever (ever) understand any other in spite of common ancestry and language and what have you is axiomatic.

We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed-fire, tangy as the early morning air.

“The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”

“Succeeding only means you get another chance to try to do it again.”