Quotes from Judith Thurman

Here was a monument, in fieldstone, to the art of family life.

We have one life to live - and one chance to live it in the richest way possible.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

A mad person sees what isn't there; A visionary sees what isn't there yet

And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown's most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.

You have to stand out and you have to fit in. And how you negotiate that tension really defines how fashionable you are.

He has shown himself to be someone who is worthy of my gratitude. For you understand, my child"—Colette was again writing to Germaine Patat—"everything I'm not speaking of in this letter.… Distance and reflexion have been working on me, and I am obliged to observe that I've been brought to this place by a well-prepared train of events, which horrifies me. I also know that the house I shall return to will be empty.

Nothing remains to me except to be someone who has never acted in her own best interest, and who has never known a greedy passion except one: to cherish.

Arkie took a dim view of patriarchal institutions - religion, capitalism, marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a woman's college: "He has to be a very good husband to e better than no husband at all.

It wasn't obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself, an individual, without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a "female-female impersonation.

It is true that most of these men were closeted transgressors, while Colette played out her revolt in public. They were secretly attracted by her vital force. Their languor and formality were alien to her—but not their fetish worship of human beauty.

I wanted you to see my heart.

my true friends always gave me this supreme proof of attachment: a spontaneous aversion to the man I loved.

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' "radiant simplicity."

This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists; of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish.