The Portrait of a Mirror Quotes

“Their missed connection was the rare kind of adolescent regret that, with time and maturity, became more rather than less painful. She was now, in his mind, far more than a person. She had to come to represent every decision he hadn't made, every opportunity forgone. She was regret personified. One can get over bad decisions, lovers lost. But it is impossible to get over someone you never really had.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“her identity had been so wrapped up in being the precocious child that she’d turned into an inept adult.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it. For unbought dresses can never be stained. Uneaten food doesn’t make you fat, and unconsumed alcohol won’t give you a hangover. Only unwritten novels are perfect.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“I'm homesick for myself
In place of home is a face I no longer recognise”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“There was a seductive, asymmetric quality to sympathy: so many reasons you might need it, yet such a narrow moral purview for eliciting the real, true, genuine thing.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“Medusa prays upon this much-worshipped prismic effect: of ineluctable identity, yet plurality of self. Originally apotropaic, her image has come to symbolize everything from Nietzschean nihilism to feminist rage, and adorn objects from Archaic terracotta vases to the logo of the fashion house Versace, the section label neatly summarized. She has, perhaps, become the ultimate symbol of metamorphosis itself: a symbol able to metamorphose into whatever you want her to symbolize.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“It was kind of nice having decisions made for you sometimes, so long as they were decisions that you liked.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“She managed to be authoritative and utterly nonthreatening at the same time. It’s not easy to make people feel smart while you’re teaching them something, but that’s—that’s precisely what she does.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“It was a formidable talent, making women feel valued and respected. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. Rarely making the first move, even less often a promise, Wes’s quiet self-assurance and Sadie Hawkins approach tended to attract the kind of women to whom Wes was most attracted: independently minded and forward thinking enough to proposition a man, confident enough in their own desirability for that man to be him.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

“You’re not mistaken, Diana. We may not fit into each other’s lives, but you’re not mistaken. You’re—an outlier.

And you’re just a liar, Diana said.”
― A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror