Quotes from Lily King

Her research had been a bit too graphic for a general readership, and her theory that adolescence didn't have to be full of the misery and rebelliousness it was in America got lost in the uproar.

Jag gråter aldrig över Paco. De där två åren med honom tynger mig inte. Vi övergick från franska till en sorts blandning av den katalanska och den kastilianska som han lärt mig, och jag undrar om det är en del av anledningen till att jag inte saknar honom, eftersom allt vi någonsin sa till varandra var på språk jag har börjat glömma bort

You don't realize how much effort you've put into covering things up until you dig them out.

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

Paco had one of his books I think, and I didn't much like the writers Paco did, men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

I think about how you get trained early on as 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 in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

My body aches from my throat to my groin. I want him to slide his fingers into my bathing suit and make all the heaviness and misery go away. I feel like a hag in a fairy tale, waiting to be made young and supple again.

Gatan och husen med sina stora tomter blir alldeles suddiga. "Han bara sprängde mig i bitar. Jag vet inte ens var jag ska få tag i bultarna och skruvarna. Jag trodde alltid om det någon gång skulle bli så att jag inte höll tillbaka någonting utan blottade mitt hjärta ..." Resten lyckas jag bara få ur mig i form av ett kvidande. "Vilket jag gjorde. Jag gjorde det den här gången och det var ändå inte nog.

swath of time that stretched out

I told him the things that were coming back to me about my mother when I was little: her lemon smell

I tell them one of our dishwashers is from Guayaquil, and they want to meet him. I get Alejandro, and he ends up sitting and smoking with them, talking about politics and grinning madly, and I get a glimpse of who he is when he isn't engulfed in spray and steam and food waste.

Man inser inte hur mycket man ansträngt sig för att dölja saker förrän man försöker gräva fram dem [Karaktärens ord]

But they are also life giving. They impregnate flowers, and they give us our food supply. They work as a collective. Plus they are responsible for the line: "And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Han parkerar på min gata och vi hånglar lite till. Inget prat. Inga pussar. Kyssarna är långa och intima, som om vi berättar allt det vi behöver säga varandra på det här viset

On clear nights the stars pierce a million holes in the darkness.

don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

The smoke of his breath drifts past my ear up toward the stars.

Det är så mycket lättare att gråta när man känner någons armar runt sig [Karaktärens ord]

I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. 'We're always, in everything we do in this world,' she said, 'limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

But others, the book said, will stay where they are for the winter. Those geese are already home.

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.

His interest lay in experiencing, in doing. Thinking was derivative. Dull. The opposite of living. Whereas she suffered through the humidity and the sago and the lack of plumbing only for the thinking.