The Receptionist Quotes

“...he said apropos of nothing one day, "No talk about 'relationships,' understood?" I think I did have the presence of mind to ask, "Why?"
"It's a waste of time," he said. "The existentialists have it right. Whatever is the case, is. No amount of talk is going to change it. The only thing we have to feel responsible for to each other is to pay attention to what's happening between us. It either is or it isn't.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker

“We are all of us searching for a perfect family. Sometimes we substitute material things, but often in the friendships we form, the lovers we take, the mates we marry, we are arranging for ourselves the understanding mother, the good father, the loving brother and sister we yearn for, the things we missed in our own.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist

“Nobody gonna harm you if you can just make ’em remember they a human bein’. You got to treat ’em like one and that’s how you remind ’em they is one. Some poor souls ain’t never had that experience. It throws ’em off their sinful course.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist

“when he sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” he was onto something. And when he screamed, “But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?” I could relate.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist

“Through the violence that marked the years between Dallas and our final departure from Vietnam, the magazine and my protected spot at it began to feel less and less protected.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist

“the change from the darkness of unbelief into “the light of reality”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist

“Then there was the shame of the writer who doesn't write. The me who carried within my breast in equal shares the conviction that I could write and the certainty that I could not. Here all the problems of shame over childhood inadequacy and adult insecurity and sexual insecurity ganged up to produce periodic bouts of thwarted attempts.”
― Janet Groth, The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker