Quotes from Lily King

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's.

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion – you've only been there eight weeks – and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.

It´s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.

But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

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

Both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.

I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other's backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.

I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart," she said finally.

It came to him that he didn't like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . .

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.

The story you think you know is never the real one.

It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

What's the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life .

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.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

But I don't trust a crowds - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain, find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is exactly my point.

I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers.

It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn't love them anymore.

things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I'm giving it credit for.

Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides.