Quotes from Lily King

What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's.

It's okay that I'm not sure what's next, that it might be something unexpected.

Elinor has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher's.

I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.

How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?

He gripped the pages and told me they were all for me, about me, because of me. But when he was at the podium and I was in the first row, he never looked at me. When he read a poem about eating a peach on an overturned rowboat, the peach I'd brought, the rowboat where we'd sat together, he said it was for his mother, who loved peaches.

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.

It's important to him, presenting this to me. I take his hand and he pulls me in and kisses me on the temple and we look through the windows again as if the house and everything inside it belongs to both of us.

She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women.

I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.

He'd always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he'd never been anything but this one self.

Well", he says finally. "There's a lot to be said for being unencumbered". He looks greedily around at the nothing of my life. "It's the scent of freedom in here, Casey. You won't be able to smell it till you've lost it.

And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there.

Love, he thought. It would come out soon enough. Words and feelings were all churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn't try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest.

We hold hands on the way back, but it feels like we're still kissing. My whole body responds to his hand in mine.

We all lose our cammin." "It's so physical. It feels like my body is rejecting me". Pg 275.

Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared.

Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.

I was feeling what I should be feeling, as if for once all the sharp awkward fragments of my life suddenly fell into their proper slots.

What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I've been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.

They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction.

mind Nell was writing: —ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers —paint on face only

Did he know? Of course he didn't. But for so long now when someone asked how she was they loaded it with pity and braced themselves for her reply, as if she had the power to hurt them with the truth.

No escribo porque tenga algo que contar. Escribo porque si no lo hago, todo empeora mucho más.