Quotes from Lily King

I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

There's a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.

It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.

If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.

Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

But I can't go out with a guy who's written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.

They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake.

I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.