Stacey > Stacey's Quotes

“Indeed, it was not unusual for the dais to be littered with panties and boxer shorts after one of Branwell's talks at the MLA.”
― James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale

“MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?” Perhaps,”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather “unlikable” protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn’t like what she found. Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer. For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?” Perhaps,”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Still, I keep coming back to the relative impunity with which the men in This Is How You Lose Her get to behave badly, and to the tone of the critical reception to these stories, which are not only stories but confessions, lamentations of misdeeds. We have all been influenced by a culture where women are considered inferior to men, and I would have loved to see what a writer of Díaz’s caliber might do if he allowed his character to step out of the constraints of the environment he grew up in, one to which readers are all subjected. In”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin,”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable. I”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“The title of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night promised just that. I read it in a few hours, tranquilized by its tenderness for two widowed characters who find late-life intimacy in the simplest of ways.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold. Our”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“That Robinson’s character eases her grief by reading speaks to me of the importance of reading. In stories, we contemplate others like and unlike ourselves, confronting situations we might also face, but differently. As we consider creatures whose background and problems and values differ from our own, we identify and sympathize and see ourselves anew. Empathy for those who are not-us humanizes us. Whether or not it translates into compassionate behavior, it stretches the boundaries of our being. We each of us expand to contain multitudes.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself,” argues that this process is “the basis of all sympathy”: “Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“With splendid specificity, all the creative texts I have studied provide alternative models for thinking about aging. Scanty and eccentric though they may be, their tributes to love and friendship tell me that many stories have yet to be recounted. But there is a late-life love tradition, and it explores the manifold ways enduring passion sustains older people dedicated to prized partnerships and also to a range of desires: to keep on writing or reading, to go on seeing and savoring beloved places or works of art, to continue nurturing each other or progenitors or descendants, to prolong the kaleidoscope of fractured and reformed memories that accrue as a diminishing future is enhanced by a lengthening past that embellishes the present for those lucky enough to be loving while living in our final years.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence.” She smiled at Edith. “I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“This would explain much of human suffering, according to my ex, who was being less playful than you might think. He really did believe that’s how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hopefully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all. —”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying? But is it too much to want somebody somewhere to say something original about it? Not”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“People thought that when you got old, you wanted your lost youth, or lost love, or men, or sex. But really you wanted work and you wanted money.”
― Charlotte Wood, The Weekend

“Too often we focus on the opportunities the US provides immigrants in the land of the “American Dream,” and not on how our mercurial national moods lead to small and large policy shifts that radically affect real people.”
― Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I understood now why so many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words. “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” There”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art. — Melissa”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“For people to learn, they need to want to learn.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“He remembered, years ago, trying to tell her that they did the same thing, he and she: they tried to discover why people did things. They listened to people talk about themselves and others, and they realized that some of them were, and some were not, telling the truth. They realized further that some people said things that were not true because they’d been told them by people who were lying or mistaken. The last time they’d talked about this, Brunetti said that what his daily routine lacked was the luxury of a reliable narrator. Paola did nothing more than smile.”
― Donna Leon, Give Unto Others

“Humanities majors,” she said. “They’re always impressed by concrete skills.”
― Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“My father exerted an emotional monopoly. His happiness tolerated no dissent. When he was in a good mood, everyone was supposed to be delighted to hear his long stories, laugh at his jokes and cheerfully partake in whatever project he had in mind—calamitous home renovations, around-the-clock printing jobs, excursions to the Bronx in search of an Italian butcher someone had mentioned. But whenever he was low or had been wronged, he made everyone pay for it. I have yet to see a face as determined as his was in anger. It was, sadly, a determination that was fixed only on itself—determined to be determined. Once he got into that state, I think he viewed any kind of compromise as self-betrayal, as if his whole being could be eroded and wiped away by the admission of a fault. I lived with my father for over twenty years, and we stayed close after I moved out. Not once, in all those decades, did he apologize to me for anything.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust