The Girls from Corona del Mar Quotes

“Whatever it is that hurts you, don't talk to anyone about it.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“What had been so funny? But you can never remember what you were laughing about, and even if you could, it seems doubtful that it would still be funny.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“It wasn't that Lorrie Ann was becoming a Goody Two-shoes. It wasn't that she wanted to be perfect or loved or approved of. No. She wanted something much more dangerous. She wanted meaning. And she thought it could be gotten by following the rules.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“yes, yes, yes. I was and am awful and terrible.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“discarded books littering my apartment like the carapaces of beetles,”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“It will be okay," Franklin said. And even though I felt he was far too optimistic, I also suspected that there was wisdom in his optimism; Franklin's scale for "okay" spanned thousands of years. He didn't worry about someone being unhappy for a few hours or days. He didn't really worry about unhappiness at all. I think he worried about animals and sunlight and possibly grain. He worried about the furtherance of human knowledge as a grand cooperative endeavor that made him coworkers with everyone from Proust to Einstein to the author of Inanna.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“How could it be that I wanted those scary narrow streets and books and coffee shops for her so much more than she wanted them for herself?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“I'm just saying, when a woman in a maiden, she's in the spotlight. Everybody cares what a pretty, young girl does and says. And she's got some pretty strict archetypes to adhere to: Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Britney Spears. Pick your poison. But when you become a young mother? People don't give a fuck what you're doing. Their eyes glaze over before they even finish asking you. Once a woman starts doing the most important work of her life, all of a sudden, nobody wants to know a thing about it.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Some have characterized the boomers as optimistic, but to my view they were simply soft and rather unprepared. They didn’t know how to cook or sew or balance their own checkbooks. They were bad at opening the mail. They got headaches while trying to lead Girl Scout meetings, and they sat down in folding chairs with their fingers pinching the bridges of their noses, trying not to cry over how boring and hard life had turned out to be, as around them feverish little girls screamed with laughter over the fact that one of them had stepped in poop..”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Sure, and fatherhood is super important too. I'm not trying to make this a women-only club by any means. Just that even men rarely view their role in child rearing as the most important thing they do, when in fact it is clearly the most important thing that anybody does.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“I’m in love with Franklin. Like really in love,” I said. She nodded. “And this whole time I’ve been, like, straining to be perfect, to not move, to not break the spell, because this is the best thing that has ever happened to me and I know that I don’t deserve him, but—” Lorrie Ann made a snorting noise. “Deserve him? Who deserves anything?” “You know what I mean,” I said. “No,” she said, “tell me, do we deserve the spring? Does the sun come out each day because we were tidy and good? What the fuck are you thinking?” I was struck dumb. “He loves you,” she said. “He loves you.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Maybe it was just that every woman has had the experience, usually quite early, of being with a man who is entirely turned on when she is not turned on at all, which was, frankly, a lot like being sober in a room full of drunks.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“The war,” Dana said. “War does not determine who is right—only who is left. Bertrand Russell said that.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Okay, example of a monad,” Arman said, leaning back again into the couch. The cinnamon rolls were burning. “Well, it’s not a concept. So it’s not red or blue or pretty or ugly. It’s more like each human being is a monad, and the existence of God is a monad, and the thing about the monads is that each one is a tiny mirror of the universe, and it fits in harmoniously with all the other monads, so that they all reflect and affect one another, no matter how far removed from one another they are in space and time.” “Is a tree a monad?” she asked, almost breathless with the beauty of this concept. “I think so. Yeah, I think everything that exists would be a monad, kind of. I don’t know. I haven’t read Leibniz in years.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“They were usually dangerously self-involved, the men I made lovers, one a Russian novelist with a recurrent alcohol problem and delusions of grandeur but with a remarkable and encyclopedic knowledge of Husserl, another a tortured African American painter (quite talented) who found his very interest and indeed love for me, a white girl, to be yet another form of his debasement and mental colonization by the white man. In short, Franklin was just not my type.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“It wasn’t that Lorrie Ann was becoming a Goody Two-shoes. It wasn’t that she wanted to be perfect or loved or approved of. No. She wanted something much more dangerous. She wanted meaning. And she thought it could be gotten by following the rules.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Some have characterized the boomers as optimistic, but to my view they were simply soft and rather unprepared. They didn’t know how to cook or sew or balance their own checkbooks. They were bad at opening the mail. They got headaches while trying to lead Girl Scout meetings, and they sat down in folding chairs with their fingers pinching the bridges of their noses, trying not to cry over how boring and hard life had turned out to be, as around them feverish little girls screamed with laughter over the fact that one of them had stepped in poop.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“I've been slowly changing things in my mind. I've been editing my memories.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“In the end, my love for her trumped everything”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“I didn’t know why I had been allowed to have so much. It didn’t seem right that I could be allowed to have still more. But I would take it. Even if it was all pure accident, and I hadn’t earned any of it, I would take it.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“You want me to be a martyr? Is that the idea? Motherhood equals martyrdom. There isn’t supposed to be any limit to the amount of suffering you can voluntarily endure?”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar

“Non ci meritiamo la primavera, e non ci meritiamo nemmeno l'inverno. Esistono e basta.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Girls from Corona del Mar