Euphoria Quotes

“You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Why are we, with all our "progress," so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? ... I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion – you’ve only been there eight weeks – and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Personality depends on context, just like culture. Certain people bring out certain traits in each other [...] You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“The story you think you know is never the real one.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart,” she said finally.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“But I don't trust a crowds - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain, find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is exactly my point.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress", so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”
― Lily King, Euphoria