Dear Fang, With Love Quotes

“It was funny, I thought, the way women let men think they ruled the world. That was the bargain they made: you take the world, and we’ll take life and death. Sure, fight wars. Make up countries. Call them whatever you want. Make up laws. It all sounds good.
But that was only to distract them so that they wouldn’t try to participate in the women’s work, which was the pulling of souls out from the darkness and the projection of light into the future."
Dear Fang, with love Rufi Thorpe --(as a midwife this quote really hit home for me)”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I love you the way you are. I love you any way you are.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“It wouldn't be easy at all. It's just that it's that simple. But simple and easy are different”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“It didn't matter how terrified I was. It didn't matter that there was no solution to the problem we faced. We would simply have to face it anyway. we didn't have to be brave or heroic, we merely had to persist. And I found that I could do that.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera was mentally ill. Otherwise, I sometimes felt the doctors were simply trying to medicate the Russianness out of her. Sometimes I wanted to reassure them: "No, no, a perverse interest in nothingness is actually perfectly normal.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“My life was worth nothing except the books I read,”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I finally did sleep for a little while, only it was like the difference between Pringles and actual chips, like someone took sleep and then put it through a horrible industrial machine, made it into a paste, and re-formed it and baked it into a shape that was supposed to look like sleep but was not anything even close.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“Something of this mood passed by the time we finally landed in Los Angeles. It is a minor miracle that it is possible to move past such moments. It seems that you are on a cliff and about to fall off, that everything is portentous and meaningful and terrifying. But the secret is that if you just wait a few hours and eat something, it passes.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“She’d asked me the secret to true love and she hadn’t liked that answer either!” “What is the secret to true love?” I asked. “Oh. To be nice to each other.” We sat in silence for a minute. To be nice to each other. “That’s actually the secret to raising children, too,” she said. “You just try to be nice to them. Not to coddle them or spoil them, not to be afraid of their anger or disappointment, but to be just to them, to be kind. Or at least, that’s what I think.” It occurred to me that I ought to go out and buy one of Judith’s books and read it.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“Like at that birthday party when she was just a child: “If you wanted a birthday party so badly, maybe you should have thrown one for yourself.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“All of it made me think of Vera’s question to me on the plane, about the little men inside her, about the possibility of the self as a swarm or a hive instead of an “I.” In particular, I was thinking of these lines from To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe wonders the exact same thing: “How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.” It was the quote I had used as the epigraph for my dissertation.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I was trying to take the idea of theory of mind, a thesis in psychology that was getting a lot of press in regards to autism, and apply it to Woolf. Theory of mind was kind of a misleading term. What these people were talking about was mind reading. Not psychic-in-a-turban mind reading but the ordinary kind we do every day. We see someone make a mad face, and we say, “Ooh, they must be mad!” We see a girl raise her hand in class, and we assume that she is going to ask a question. We infer people’s states of mind from their actions and from the context. The argument was that autistic people had trouble making these same inferences. They weren’t able to accurately infer what someone else might be thinking from the external indicators. Other people were as unfathomable to them as aliens or robots.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I mean, on the one hand, it was a spectacular display. I wish I had fucking video. His main move was the handclap, and he would do it big up over his head. But then, at the same time, he was so weirdly confident and so clearly hot for that Susan woman that sometimes his dorkiness would loop back around and become cool again in some kind of ironic, really confusing way. Oh, it was bizarre and impressive and very very funny, and it took me two mojitos to be able to calm down enough to ignore it and just focus on Daniel.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“On one of the pockmarked walls on a narrow cobblestone street the constitution of Užupis had been translated into twenty languages and then engraved on great slabs of shining mirrored metal so that as you read them, you had to face yourself in the mirror. The items ranged from the profound to the whimsical. Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnia, while the River Vilnia has the right to flow by everyone. Everyone has the right to be idle. Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat. Everyone has the right to look after a dog till one or the other dies. A dog has the right to be a dog. A cat is not obliged to love its master, but it must help him in difficult times. Everyone has the right to sometimes be unaware of his duties. Everyone has the right to be happy. Everyone has the right to be unhappy. Everyone has the right to be silent. Everyone has the right to have faith. No one has the right to violence. Everyone has the right to encroach upon eternity. It ended with these simple instructions: Do not fight. Do not win. Do not surrender.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“Why not Moses?” Kat asked. “If she must have a messiah complex, why not at least have a Jewish one? It’s like Christianity seeped into her through the groundwater. Or maybe through Fang.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera actually was mentally ill. Otherwise, I sometimes felt the doctors were simply trying to medicate the Russianness out of her. Sometimes I wanted to reassure them: “No, no, a perverse interest in nothingness is actually perfectly normal.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“So you have to date a Christian, I get it, it’s Rancho Cucamonga, but did you have to pick a Mormon boy?” she would ask. It wasn’t the special underwear, or the idea of getting your own planet, or even the Christianity that really upset her, though she did openly mock all of these things. It was that the Mormons had set about baptizing the dead in an effort to save them retroactively, and in particular, they had been baptizing the victims of the Holocaust. They had even baptized Anne Frank. It was offensive beyond all belief, though the Mormons seemed to have done it in genuine good faith.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I had assumed that if I gave it enough time and put in the years of consistently being there, being steadfast, being warm, some kind of authentic intimacy would grow between us. Now she was sixteen, and I was gradually coming to the conclusion that waiting for a teenage girl to want to be friends with her father was like waiting for a cat to want to take a swim.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“Sure, I said, still wondering over what exactly Vera's thesis had been. If there was no free will, was it even possible to give consent? And if there was no such thing as consent, was it possible to be raped? Or were human being more like billiard balls, randomly, even violently clacking against each other then re-forming in the vacuum of space, pulled into orbits around the nearest star? Possibly such a paper, while insane and even wildly offensive, could be logically consistent and, in its own perverted way, brilliant.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I’ve decided that the problem with my dad is that he is trying to be likable all the time. Inside his head there is some sinister laugh track going on that either guffaws or boos, and no one can hear it but him and he lets it rule everything he does. God”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“What worried me most was that she no longer seemed to be trying to find a way out of the maze of her depression. She had simply lain down and gone to sleep inside one of anxiety’s winding tentacle arms. I”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“What I had always loved most about literature was the way it eased my own loneliness. Even”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“We had to pause for a moment at a red light, and the group clustered tight around Darius as he went on. "Even stranger, Vilnius appears on early maps under a variety of names. To the Germans, Vilnius was called Die Wilde, because it was surrounded by wilderness and swamps. But the irony of a city called the Wilderness is not slight. Well! The Poles called her Wilno, the Lithuanians called her Vilnius, the French and Russians called her Vilna. It is also, of course, Vilna is Yiddish. Sometimes Vilnius appears multiple times on the same map, as though she is a pair of entangled particles that can exist in two places at once. In some ways, it is difficult to think of Vilnius as a single city at all. Czeslaw Milosz famously wrote a poem about Vilnius called 'City Without a Name.' So how shall we think of this city then?”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love

“I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me that Kat wound up with another Russian emigre. Her Russianness could not be eradicated no matter how long she spent here. She was the only person our age I knew who brewed coffee in a percolator. But then, it wasn't really about Russia, it was about Russianness. It was about ways of making tea, raising children, the importance of piano lessons, the incompleteness of a home without nice rugs. I wondered if Misha minded the way she kept the original plastic on the seats of the dining-room chairs. It made a small hissing noise whenever you sat down. But maybe his mother had done the same, maybe he found it comforting, maybe together they recoiled at the sight of naked upholstery in other people's homes.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love