The Company She Keeps: A Novel

by Mary McCarthy

Actually, she doubted whether she could ever have been an actress, acknowledging that she found it more amusing and more gratifying to play herself than to interpret any character conceived by a dramatist.

She would never have left one man unless she had had another to take his place.

dude they are people, not jobs

those men are homosexuals!”

...and?

Unfortunately, the whole thing fell extraordinarily flat owing to the fact that Mrs. La Plante did not know what a homosexual was, and, as the night-club man pointed out later, it was no use at her age trying to tell her.

...again, what?

(Yet, she thought, she had not brought the book along for purposes of ostentation: it had been given her by a publisher’s assistant who saw her off at the train, and now she had nothing else to read. So, really, she could not be accused of insincerity. Unless it could be that her whole way of life had been assumed for purposes of ostentation, and the book, which looked accidental, was actually part of that larger and truly deliberate scheme. If it had not been this book, it would have been something else, which would have served equally well to impress a pink middle-aged stranger.)

this is the definition of "not like other girls" and i so relate

that extraordinary class of readers who have perfect literary digestions, who can devour anything printed, retaining what suits them, eliminating what does not, and liking all impartially, because, since they take what they want from each, they are always actually reading the same book

But if for the people outside she was playing the great lady, for the man across the table she was the Bohemian Girl. It was plain that she was a revelation to him, that he had never under the sun seen anyone like her.

Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept looking for, the one who could tell her what she was really like.

the clever ones were alcoholic or slightly homosexual,

this is funny to me and makes a ton of sense

“Hell,” he said, “it’s a funny thing, but I’m so happy now that I don’t care whether I ever see you again. I probably won’t feel that way after you’re gone. Right now I think I can live on this one day for the rest of my life.”

“If I were ten years younger,” the man said, in a curious, measured tone, as if he were taking an oath, “I’d never let you get off this train.” It sounded, she thought, like an apology to God.