Quotes from Susanna Moore

She refers to her inability to find true love as if it were a congenital weakness or fair punishment for some feminist principle that she mistakenly espoused in late adolescence and cannot now abandon honorably.

I wondered if, in some way that I did not understand, he was using that knowledge to presume an intimacy between us, as if we shared a secret that was exciting because it was dangerous to both of us.

I didn't think I seemed like the sort of person who would mind." "What?" "I'd have fucked you anyway." . . . "I thought I'd lose you," he said at last. "Have you ever told me the truth?" "Look—" he paused. "People lie to me all day long. And I lie to them all day long. I've done it all my life.

People think I'm much more than I am.

He was convincing. Lying as cultural attribute. A hazard of the job. And I fell for it. It did not occur to me that he lies simply because he likes it. Lies to bosses. Lies on the stand. He boasts about it. Lies under oath. It's called testilying, he'd told me. Lies to women, especially to women. Starting with his mother and working his way through all of us. His wife. The doll collection. He couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.

I was finding it difficult to speak with any vivacity, any pleasure. I wanted to get off the phone. I wanted him to feel bad, too.

She smiled with a kind of abashed formality, embarrassed by revelation.

Give me my Scallop shell of quiet.

I do not remember too much now. Certain things. Certain images. All sorts of irrational, irrational because nonsensically inappropriate, pieces of information stream through my head, as if my unconscious were bombarding me with words and phrases, an enemy agent subverting a radio broadcast.

I heard the sound of footsteps behind me, beneath the distant swish-sound of the trucks. I looked over my shoulder. There was no one there. Which frightened me. Because I could hear him.

She knows the poem.

Sometimes when I am not expecting it, when I let down my guard for a moment, allowing the thousands, the millions of little synapses in my head to work their will, conveying to me just what it is that I cannot bear to know, cannot bear to be known, I do remember.

And I'd said, wouldn't it be easier if you just hit me once in the face, and got it over with?

As always, I was pulled in by the small gesture. It was all that I knew about him, and it was perilous to me.

Will you tell me?" I asked. "Tell you what?" He spoke flatly, as if he dreaded my question and already knew that he would answer it. "What you did." "Why do you think that knowing makes a difference?" "I've thought that all my life." "Well, you're wrong. Knowing don't mean shit.

This happens all the time," he said. "You know what I'm saying?" "What happens? "Murder." I was silent. "That's the thing about it. It never stops. Never.

sighing as if he regretted leaving, although I thought not, that sudden oncoming of emptiness and sadness washing over me then, too.

I am so ashamed by the things that used to make me unhappy.

I have not flirted with him. And besides, even if I had, which I hadn't, flirting is not risky. It only raises the possibility of risk.

I wondered if I was afraid of him, after all.

There's something I know but I don't know it yet. It's driving me nuts.

I don't know where I am. My mind races. I feel like if I started to run, I'd never stop.

It began to rain in that rushed and urgent way that it rains in New York.

I think it may have something to do with something I heard when I was a kid. Something I think I heard. Actually, I know, know for a fact, that I heard something.