Quotes from Lily King

While I'm drinking, the phone rings. If you are listening for it, the phone is always ringing at Iris. People call day and night for reservations. Sometimes they're looking for a table for that night. Sometimes it's for a year form now. People are crazy in their planning. How do they know where they will be living next year or if they will even be alive? I'm too superstitious to make plans like that.

I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I'm like a teenager trying more to think about sex.

Between our call and today he talked himself out of me, and now he is coming back around. 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.

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead ...

I need a martini in my hand and a girl in my bed.

The visit has unveiled the mystery of this man's devastating ambivalence years ago, but she could have done without his but-for-the-grace-of-God relief as he hugged her goodbye.

She laughed. 'Was she wine or bread to you?' 'What do you mean?' 'It's from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.' 'Wine, I suppose.' 'Would it have turned to bread?' 'I don't know.' 'It doesn't always.' 'No, I suppose not.

I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality.' '"Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,

We wander through Art of the Ancient World, past a Babylonian lion, Estruscan urns, an enameled Nubian bracelet, body parts fro Greek statues: a sandaled foot, a muscular male bum with one thigh. It's good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been. We move into Art of Europe, the haloes and angels, the sacred birth and bloody murder of one man over and over, a whole continent possessed by one story for centuries.

The visit had unveiled the mystery of this man's devastating ambivalence years ago, but she could have done without his but-for-the-grace-of-God relief as he hugged her goodbye.

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. 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. 1/13

Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I'm thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

Third date, I want to say, but I can't with Silas. Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don't acknowledge that they're happening or say what they mean. IT all feels a bit haphazard and weightless, and to call attention to this might let out too much of the air.

We're walking close and bump against each other. Another person might have just taken his hand and said, Are you ever going to kiss me? But I'm not that person. It always takes me by surprise when someone wants to kiss me, even if they've met me at midnight with wine and a blanket. People change their mind. Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow.

I'm wondering how to tell him about Oscar. I want to know if it matters to him. IT seems like the only way to find out his feelings for me. It was easier to imagine doing this when he wasn't in the room, when he wasn't leaning over a table on his elbows, twisting up a chopstick wrapper with fingers that are unexpectedly familiar.

Silas leaves me a message, then another, and I don't call back. I've made my choice. I'm done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don't know or can't tell you what they want. I'm done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

Don't you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can't be without power—it doesn't work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.

Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?

until I started dating the funny guy in workshop who wrote gloomy two-page stories set in New Hampshire mill towns.

particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

Good heavens,' he says. 'Is that what it's like with your writers? The word "snug" and you're mad in love?

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.

conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.