Quotes from Francine Prose

Yvonne had created this place for her and for others like her: born into the wrong life, the wrong body, an innocent victim of God's mistake.

The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.

Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.

Once we know that something turned out all right, that we navigated a rough patch more or less intact, it becomes harder to pity our younger self or remember the grief and confusion, the dread of the disaster that didn't happen, the panic of the deer frozen in the headlights of the car that stopped in time.

The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills.

There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react

Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter.

But briefly, Theresa's case has been diagnosed as one of acute hallucinatory psychosis, brought on by a particularly difficult and prolonged adolescent psychosexual adjustment, no doubt aggravated by a somewhat obsessional religious nature. What that means in layman's terms is—as I'm sure you know—Theresa has temporarily lost touch with what we call reality.

from the earliest passages to the diary's final entry, in which she talks about her "dual personality," the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her "better, deeper, and purer" self.

Love is blooming on the riverbanks, in the alleys of Montmartre. Park benches exist for lovers exhausted by excessive kissing.

illness of Bep's father—bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking.

I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.

she lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions;

That's the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.

Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.

she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: 'Is this just a joke or does she really mean it?

Don't order boeuf bourguignon if you're a vegetarian, don't venture into the tearooms if you don't like ladies with lapdogs. Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.

Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.

I felt that I was hearing the answer to a question that I hadn't known enough to ask.

is starting to happen between the two teenagers: "It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can't you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?

One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?

Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let's imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than a beautiful man in a dress.

But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.