Patricia Murphy > Patricia's Quotes

“There’s a certain kind of woman who will notice someone’s terror and call it bravery.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“There is a certain kind of person who, when insulted, will assume you have something they need.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“attempts to nail down “who we really are” most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition.”
― Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast

“Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation,”
― Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast

“when adventure begins to lose its appeal, it starts to feel more like adversity.”
― Jennifer Pharr Davis, Becoming Odyssa : Adventures on the Appalachian Trail

“If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Silverman also contends that a baby’s demands on the mother can be “very flattering to the mother’s narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant’s lack, and so—by extension—her own.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“We like you to use black ink,” said the secretary. “The copier can read it better.” She said it wearily, as though her travails with the copier were a long and arduous romance in which she had ruefully adopted the role of appeaser.”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“It was as though each morning over breakfast Zeb was rehearsing all the sadness he would feel in his life.”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“Ryan’s mother was a blankly cheerful woman whose main project seemed to be maintaining silence;”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“His sorrow floated through the room, disembodied; he did not appear to feel it, but she was acutely aware of its weight.”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“Forrest Sanders loved children in the showy way people do when they are trying to hide some moral or emotional deficiencies in themselves.”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“They laughed, carefully; it was straining, this proving one’s humanity to one another.”
― Karen E. Bender, A Town of Empty Rooms

“We are, I think, eager to show mettle we don’t yet have.”
― Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women: Stories

“Occasionally, I’d notice I’d lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind.”
― Howard Axelrod, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

“Summer’s ending and the closest thing I’ve had to an adventure was a Google search of Baja California.”
― Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot

“Perhaps that was the nature of love: either a person was not in it enough to care, or was in it too deeply to make anything but mistakes.”
― Lori Ostlund, After the Parade

“Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir