Quotes from Lily King

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.

It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. 'Don't stop' I said. 'Your typing makes my brain work better.

He didn't answer, but I wasn't bothered. I was flattered that we'd gotten to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology. We passed through a long swath of fireflies, thousands of them flashing all round us, and it felt like soaring through stars.

Who are we and were are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress" so limited in understanding and sympathy and the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

It's always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,' Fabiana says. 'It always is.

She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she'd give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages?

At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. 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.

The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.

But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement

He has called to ask you out on a date. Do not mention a dead mother.

What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.

And yet she wrote with an urgency most of us felt but did not have the courage to reveal, because we were too beholden to the traditions of the old sciences. For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions.

Lots of sex tonight,' she said. 'The men are a bit threatened by the stones, apparently. The night of the minyana they need to be reassured that their women still want them.' 'Reassure away.

Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can't solve.

So much of this trip had been spent gazing at spectacular sights, which always filled me, as this one did now, with agonizing frustration. Why couldn't I simply accept and enjoy beauty? What was it that stirred up this terrible discomfort? ...We agreed it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death.

Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, 'Your typing makes my brain work batter,' I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work.

I meet Silas at the movie theater on Church Street. We choose seats close to the front. He's wearing a striped wool hat that he keeps on the whole movie, and our bodies never touch. I've never been more aware of not touching someone in my life.

I feel like I got most of life's lessons before i turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don't have to tell you that.

I try to write something new. It's bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn't feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.