Sister Age Quotes

“I kept wishing with real regret that I were capable of living in such continued simplicity. But I am not. Sometimes I honestly want to live in a plain room with a narrow bed, a chair, a table. But then I would need a bookcase. I would see a poster I must put on the wall. I would pick up a shell here, a bowl or vase there, another poster, enough books for two bookcases, a soft rug someone might give me--and where would the first plainness be? I cannot fight too hard against it, but I regret it.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“I have spent my life in a painstaking effort to tell about things as they are to me, so that they will not sound like autobiography but simply like notes, like factual reports.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“I never accepted the plain truth that I myself could hold no interest, no appeal, for the cool, gracious old lady. It was a kind of rebuff that perhaps Americans, very warm, generous, naive people, are especially attuned to. I explained it to myself. Spiritually, we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not simply feeling superior to us; there is also tolerance and understanding, which we are as yet incapable of recognizing.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“What did the child-woman have to say except that she was happy to be living with Hubert--a big, pompous, grasping, scheming, conniving stud who used her at his will and shaped her affections and her tastes and in general raped her spirit.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“...he began to feel that he was really not talking to the woman at all, but that she was, with her strange smooth hair and her quiet way of drinking, his inner self, the true and only companion he could talk to lately, the one remaining friend...”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“I let myself exist mainly through my children... [but] I could not even guess at the lives my children led.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age

“If I were rich, I would buy him a new black suit. ... If I had next week's allowance and had not spent this week's on three Cherry Flips ...”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Sister Age