Quotes from Lily King

My mother was a real person. I am not a real person.

It's not here anymore," he said. "What?" "What happened." "Then where is it?" "It's gone. It's over. You can't find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.

It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while shifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

It's a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I'll put this down on the page but it's not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.

She wondered how other people adjusted to vacations. It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral.

A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors. Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

I don't trust a crowd—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 you 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 my point exactly.

I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed.

He seems genuinely happy for me. You can't always count on a guy for that.

Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.

Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all.

Lynn didn't know my mother, but she's the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

He didn't like her strong, nor did he like her weak.

No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they're writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It's when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.

I've forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.

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?

Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible.

This was the way it was with Marc. His heart had a narrow field of vision. I knew it held a great many things, but the aperture was small and I had to wait my turn to be rotated back around into the light where I would glow so brightly I'd be all he could see.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall.

Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,' I said. 'They mourn.' 'They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn't tragic.' 'No, it isn't. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There's no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there's been a terrible mistake, isn't it?' 'We're sort of big dramatic babies in comparison,

He has us draw a floor plan of the first place we ever remember living. 'The rooms, the closets, the hallway,' he says as he draws one himself on the blackboard. He turns back to us and says, 'Now add the significant details: the couch, the bourbon bottle, the slot between the wall and the fridge.' He laughs. 'You see? I've already told you my whole childhood in three details.' He jogs to the left and writes in block letters: NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

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.

My mom was a real person. I am not a real person. She had convictions and took action. She has purpose and belief. She helped others. I help no one. She helped found that donation organization. I couldn't even write one thank-you letter for a refrigerator. All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams. It's all I've wanted. And now I'm not even able to do that.