Acts of Service Quotes

“How can a body be safe when it's only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Somehow, [...] I grew up talking about sex as this thing women should have however they wanted. Sexual freedom as this great sort of penacle beyond morality, or anything provincial. So I am supposed to think that i can't damage myself, that things don't hurt me if I choose them, if I see them clearly. Isn't that just the deepest submission to power?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“You know, I don't have any idea. I think that first I have to get the thing I want, and maybe then I can figure out why I wanted it. Or whether it's good.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“What a pleasure it was to be obvious, even if what was obvious was merely my body”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“We were taught to value love yet not to rely on it too heavily, because the world of excessive freedom in which we had been made would not foster the long-suffering loyalty that love required. We were encouraged to care deeply about the state of our world but our ability to affect it personally was very much in doubt. In general, we were told that the distance between desire and obligation had been closed in the preceding decades, but everyone seemed to agree that the absence of obligation would not free us. Most of all we found ourselves believing in complexity. This paradigm had some merit; it allowed us to avoid extreme states of dogma and ignorance, like militarism or participation in pyramid schemes.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tell us how we matter.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“A life knows that it needs a shape and, taking cues from films and lives it has glimpsed, chooses a core around which to bend itself. A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“...the sense that men were alien, that if I were to foster any intimacy with a man it would be both despite and because of the fact that I could only be a body to him. And I had been right to be afraid. How can a body ever be safe when it is only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house? But Nathan was not alien. He had seen the lights on in the house: he has discerned the scenes that took place away from the windows, in the secret rooms. His acknowledgement of my body had allowed me to start to forget about it. The facade of the house has been my duty, my obsession, and now I could wander away from it for days, trusting it had proved its use.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“I felt toward him the softness you feel toward the one room in which you are allowed to be alone”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Often we did not have the jobs we dreamed about, but more often we were not quite sure what we should dream about. It was no longer defensible to build a life around acquiring money, goods, or status. We were taught to value love yet not to rely on it too heavily, because the world of excessive freedom in which we had been made would not foster the the long-suffering loyalty that love required. We were encouraged to care deeply about the state of our world but our ability to affect it personally was very much in doubt.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“When I thought of him I didn’t text him because it felt good to know that he thought of me too but that we had no need of each other, that we would ask nothing of each other, that what we offered each other was sheer and uncompromised pleasure.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“It wasn’t just the desire—an overwhelming, murderous desire that ate everything it touched, that howled when we saw each other—but the nature of the desire, which lived in absolute solitude and would rather have died than make demands.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“But wasn’t that the nature of all love? Gratitude, for how we had been made to feel?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“a fist in a velvet glove. She wants to be subdued, she wants to be dominated, but she wants it to be intensely intimate, intensely sweet.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“In fact it would’ve seemed like the ultimate artistic coup: to be so skilled at arousing a desire as vivid as Olivia’s while retaining the ability to witness it with detachment.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“When I watched the way he treated Olivia I began to suspect that what he relished most was drawing out a person’s emotions and desires while remaining completely untouched by them.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“But it also easily justified lethargy. Looking around at the moral compromises baked into every choice, it sometimes seemed as though inertia was the least objectionable course.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“I envied extraordinarily religious people, who subscribed to a code that determined the things they should want, the things that were good, and the things that were bad. They had these measures of certainty. And they had rituals that made their lives feel governed by the logic of time: baptisms, holidays, weekly ceremonies, recitations, prayers. They were, I imagined, striving toward a set of impossible ideals and yet constantly forgiven for their failure to achieve. What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“In a life in which there are many choices and few genuine struggles, there is nevertheless no paucity of emotion, and you will find that something enters the center of your life almost against your will (though, because your life is more clearly agreeable than almost any other across space and time, the feeling that it is against your will is illusory). Something enters the center of your life. Sometimes it is a ubiquitous though painful loss, or a persistent fixation on your own inadequacy in the face of this large and agreeable life and its endless opportunities. A life knows that it needs a shape and, taking cues from films and lives it has glimpsed, chooses a core around which to bend itself. A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“What a pleasure it was to be obvious, even if what was obvious was nearly my body. I knew that it haunted women that their bodies were designated for sex. Even as an adolescnet I had know that. Had approached my body with fear as much as hope. Yet with Nathan I feel deep relief with how obvious it seemed to him that my body had a purpose, a nature, one that he could access naturally. [...] In some way we had been brought up to be weary toward all women's bodies.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter. Don’t we love a cashed check, a passport, the touch of a president’s hand, though each pleasure rests on a cruelty just beyond our sight? The finger points, without equivocating, at us, and we wonder at being chosen.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“There’s no one I could look at, that anyone could look at, to distill their sexuality into a couple of paragraphs. Succinctly, clearly. I’m better at it than most, but it can’t be done—that’s why people are interesting sexually even when they’re uninteresting in other ways.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“that the only real way to fail, to fuck badly, is to know what you want and to extract it from another person.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“But you like proof. Proof of desire, proof of sex, proof of pleasure.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“Vanity is such a sin in women, so obviously, grotesquely shameful, that when people loved my body they usually told me in a tone implying that the very acknowledgment, in any but the most tender postcoital context, was trivial and degrading. Even bolder lovers spoke to me as though anticipating I would dismiss their attention in some cloud of embarrassment.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“When you know from the beginning what’s allowed and what isn’t, what someone says they’ll want, what room is there for you to figure out what’s going to happen—or for her to discover that she wants something she didn’t realize? For the sex to actually open up something?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“I found that I had been exhausted by all the uncertainties of romance: by waiting, by hoping, by convincing, by attempting, even by succeeding. I knew this was weakness, knew it was capitulation.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“She had been in love with him for years. Fervently, outrageously in love with him. But Nathan was that rare person exempt from love.”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“I remember the feeling that she meant: the sense that men were alien, that if I were to foster any intimacy with a man it would be both despite and because of the fact that I could only be a body to him. And I had been right to be afraid. How can a body be safe when it's only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house?”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service

“We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter”
― Lillian Fishman, Acts of Service