More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“It’s going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it.”
The thing is, I know you can’t make them dinner. Not a mouthful, not if they’re dying.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.
our voices were imprinted on each other’s aural hearts—“I’ve
Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.
Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have “everything,” not success-type “everything.” I mean, not when the “everything” isn’t about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there’s at least a precedent). There’s no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and learning that it’s not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were.
I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.
so intense was her glow in the dark.
“I wonder,” I said to my mother, “if I’ll ever get married.” “Well, if you do,” she said, “marry someone you don’t mind.”
You know, when you come to think about it, it’s a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?
She was an actress, and like all actresses, she was only real when she was pretending.
“Sometimes if you can’t get what you want, you get what the person you want wants.”
Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect . . . you can wreak all the havoc you want.
There is something fascinating about a person’s face when they’re not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing. Pleasure is a lure. When you’re smiling, the whole world would rather smile with you and have another watercress sandwich than ponder the universe with an ex-Beatle.
Virginia Woolf can’t be right. Nothing can come of this insane social impasse.
“How do you write?” I did not try and spill red wine on their suede pants, I would just smile and say, “On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.”
they didn’t seem as though they’d mind a few dead leaves.
I certainly couldn’t have lived the life she was living, so remote and empty and clean.
Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.
Did it mean that we were going to have to be gloomy now that we were about to be thirty? Or maybe she was in love with him and it ate up all her charm.
