Quotes from Lily King

It's a purging of sorts, that ride, and usually lasts me a few hours.

And this led to another round of mapping as we separated men from women, finding that while the male ethos usually represented the culture at large, within a culture women offset the ideal.

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. you then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing (Pg.79)

And I kiss him. A long uninterrupted kiss that goes straight through my body, ringing it in the very best way.

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.

thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

Victor asks us to find the moments of heat in the writing we have done, has us circle and isolate those words, and with them we write a poem. We read them out loud. There's one about an ashtray, a sequined dress, flour on a kitchen floor. Victor says something about each one. The feeling in the room is beautiful, wide open.

When I get out of the car I'm so horny I can barely walk up the driveway.

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. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture, but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and reveal it to the world. Bu the world is deaf. The world--and I really mean the West--has no interest in change or self improvement...

Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That's what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it's contagious because while you're reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.

Did love, she wondered, include this desperate yearning to present the world as truly beautiful to someone else?

Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. '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 better," I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.

Ik zou het nog niet half zo lang hebben volgehouden,' zei ik, maar toen besefte ik dat hij in veel opzichten op de Dobu leek: zijn paranoïde trekjes, zijn zwarte humor, zijn wantrouwen jegens plezier, zijn geheimzinnigdoenerij. Ik ging als vanzelf aan zijn resultaten twijfelen. Als er maar één kenner van een bepaald volk is, zegt diens analyse dan meer over dat volk of over hem? Zoals gewoonlijk was ik meer geïnteresseerd in het raakvlak tussen die twee dan in andere dingen.

She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown.

Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

People are always wine to me, never bread

He listens. He breathes into the phone. 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. Your words go scattershot off of it.

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. It was exhilarating and infuriating

But don't you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?' 'Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself.

I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer

It is a subtle violence, the violence of absence.

Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.

She wraps an arm around me and pulls me in tight. 'I know how you feel. You know I do. It's good to get whacked open at least once, though,' she says. 'You can't really love from inside a big thick shell.

I understood then how guarded I'd been before with men, how little of me I'd let them see.