Quotes from Lily King

Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?

When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can't give love anymore. She wouldn't be able to love her children. It struck her suddenly as the very worst thing about death, worse than not being able to breathe or laugh or kiss. A kind of existential suffocation, to not be able to give her children her love anymore.

I'm scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal.

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell.

I spend the night that way, passing through layers of anxiety, humiliation, and despair. Somewhere close to dawn I lose some consciousness. It isn't sleep exactly, but I have to think of it as sleep because it's all I ever get anymore.

The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it's hard to know what to say next.

She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic.

I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she's inside me, and there's no difference between us or that the difference doesn't matter. I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.

I know you are drunk on youth and immortality, but this is how you die

Can we have one day when we don't have to talk about the meaning of life? -I don't think we ever talk about anything else.

I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile.

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it was her right size.

Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

I'm usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing." "From heartbreak?" "Yeah." My throat is closing. "I can usually get out of the way before it hits me straight on." "That's not really heartbreak then, is it?

It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring. Maybe that's all it was.

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,' he says. Listen to your stentorian teacher voice. I do feel like I'm shrinking the Shadow a bit.

I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you've disappointed them.

But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time.

Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake.

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel's colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men.

All the people she was missing, the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

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.