Women and Men Quotes

“And isn't this hard when we ourselves are always at the beginning of ourselves?”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Opera's not for everyone, especially at these prices.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“People R Matter.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“...for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us...”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“And when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?--that's a burglar with self-respect.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, you'd get in there and go so deep you'd never stop falling.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people, it seems.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightening by an imbalance between earth and heaven.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“We remember what's going on. Already remember what's been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I'd pick up, and all I'd hear was someone weeping.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world...”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Do you ever feel,' she wonders, 'that we fit into a large life that doesn't know us but--hold us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“You find yourself in other people.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breath. All alone we have to invent even that.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“And she knew she was his harmonic mean, his chess mate, his past, his walking memory, and in a language he liked even more than American (and to use the Shakespeare words he had just read but thought that she had not) his “ventricle of memory.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Life's in parts, and some go together and some don't, and some incongruously don't, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Isn't there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you're still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“... between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it--as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Memory kept things from being over.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“If you can describe something, you must take responsability for it.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“He's seeing things, he's a victim of last night, last year, of what he's read or been told; and he's sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“It is through each other that we can see.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“He alone can return to Earth to try to do something, only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“There is no future. It's sentiment about what might have been.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

“It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think.”
― Joseph McElroy, Women and Men