My Face for the World to See Quotes

“I had no idea what a delicious feeling it was, to be free, to be absolutely unconcerned about whether one loved or didn't love. It was such a bore, loving. Being so concerned, so dreadfully afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. She was so glad to be rid of it, all the concern.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“Failure was always present; it changed its aspect, acquired new forms. Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure. What was it that I'd once thought intolerable? In a few years, it had become tolerable. The reasons for living changed. At the end, the great pang would be that death deprived one of the very, very simplest things; the simpleness of sight, the mechanical marvel of breathing. Ah, she mustn't feel the way she did. Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn't always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“I'd have chosen another life if I were a pretty girl. Would I? she said; I'd have to be a pretty girl first, and then I'd have to choose among the possibilities open to a pretty girl. They weren't so various; not really. They may have looked various, to someone who wasn't, but there weren't so many choices when you knew”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things to coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be. Whatever money did, it didn't do the things it was popularly supposed to do, and I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because [...] I no longer spoke with the suspect voice of poverty. My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived. But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in the Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and the grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool? Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren't, perhaps, sinister at all. It was only a kind of voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“Why didn't I go back to New York? New York, New York; she'd never had any luck with anybody from New York.
I was going back; she needn't worry about that.
Soon?
Soon enough.
Please, sooner than that.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“The experience of horror is an experience of emptiness.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“I had wanted a life less difficult than the life I had had, the life I was afraid of, and it had ended like this.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“My God, men: men were only something women needed in addition to clothes.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“Did I know a buyer? Someone interested in second-hand souls? Someone who'd care to exchange?”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“And I remembered it so sharply now, how I'd brought back to a house he could not endure a man who was my father and who was dead now”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn't always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“For even failure, here, would be for her more satisfying than any life lived out, moderately happy, with a brand-new range and a child and a husband who went off every repetitious morning to work, somewhere else. The town was necessary for her. It was the place she would have, finally, chosen.”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“She had thought that one did things and that was the end of them. They had no consequences provided one didn't think of them as having consequences. They all happened on the outside to someone you had decided to be at the moment you were doing them”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See

“That was silly: there was nothing to be afraid of; and then I began to feel myself drift away, slowly, the bird's song diminishing, into the unguardedness of sleep”
― Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See