Old Flame Quotes

“To want the whole thing of someone but be unable to have it. This is the pain of love.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“Let me tell you a story about how you are living for you, searching for beach glass on a foreign beach, far from any boy you've ever loved, thinking about the book you're reading, a novel about a woman who goes crazy, and how you'll begin worrying, fearing, knowing, that one day you'll go crazy, too, even if only for a little bit, for a hot second, when you see the madness of your existence glimmer like it sometimes does, in the steam from a pot of soup, in the middle of sex, in the aisle seat as the plane rises away from the earth.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“I felt angry, suddenly, that I was the one with the child inside me. Either decision, in the end, would impact me more than him. I would 'lose' or 'keep' the baby. My body would change or not change. Both of our worlds would shift, but it would be mine that would explode. A head would emerge from between my legs. Or else it wouldn't.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“Did I really want only to be free and prolific, like I imagined I did? Or had I been conditioned to prioritize ambition, individualism, myself over any other self? Why did writing a book seem so much more important, legitimate, interesting than creating a human life? ... Why was I working so hard, spinning my wheels, to separate myself from everyone else, when in fact what I had always longed for was togetherness?”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“Look,' she said. 'Being a mother is the most complicated thing I have done in this life. It's as if, overnight, you have lost the self you once knew. ... And sometimes - sometimes that is unbearable. And yes, sometimes you are the housewife, you are standing there with the laundry and cursing to yourself, you are ready to scream, you think: How can I exist in this domestic scene when I have all these thoughts, all these things I want to be doing, all these things I want to say! But it was only after I adopted the girls that I began to actually see what life was. ... Being a feminist is about love ... It's about finding power in love, finding a politics in love. ... A mother's is the deepest love that exists. There's nothing else that comes close.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“Why did Massimo's mind matter more than mire? Why did Sandro get his freedom to be an artist, without having to answer to anything or anyone else, slipping into a professorship without ever even trying? Why had my father gotten away without washing his own underwear for thirty years? I saw so clearly everything I had given up in my life, despite trying so hard to live by my own standards. I realized that I hadn't just given things up for these men, but for myself, as I tried to become them, to want what they wanted, to embody the masculinity that kept them invulnerable. I thought that if I could be stronger, if I could emulate their strength, their confidence, I could be invited in. But I never was. I was left there with the milk. I had no idea who I was anymore. I don't know if I had ever known.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“Jesus Christ, there was the Fontana del Nettuno! ... I had never once thought about this statue when I lived here; I had taken it for granted, written it off as historical bore. But now it spoke to me as very real and very powerful, the depiction of the serious if poorly endowed man, concerned with the wider world, while the women below him were consumed with the task of expelling liquid from their own bodies to quench the thirst of the community, their babies, everyone else but themselves.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame

“As always happened when I read writing that moved me, I allowed myself to fully succumb to it, taking the poem in through my eyes but reading it with my entire body, until, by the last line - Jesus Christ, her last line - I was crying at my desk.
'There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,' Ras finished, 'it will always whisper, you can't have it all / but there is this.”
― Molly Prentiss, Old Flame