The Lives of Girls and Women
Some passages that stood out to me
"...the thought og being naked, stabbed me with shame in the pit of my stomach." (41)
"Being dead, it invited desecration. I wanted to poke it, trample it, pee on it, anything to punish it, to show what contempt I had for its being dead." (43)
"The active verb confused me. He died. It sounded like something he willed to do, chose to do. As if he said, "Now I'll die." In that case it could not be so final. Yet I knew it was." (44)
"Being forgiven creates a peculiar shame." (55)
"They were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece." (59)
"I thought of them watching the manuscript leave their house in its padlocked box and I felt remorse, that kind of remorse which has on its other side a brutal, unblemished satisfaction." (60)
" "You want to hide your brains under a bushel out of pure perversity but that's not my lookout," she said. "You just do as you please." " (64)
"...scenes from the past were liable to pop up at any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present." (70)
"Other people than Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace would say to me, "I seen that letter of your mother's in the paper," and I would feel how contemptuous, how superior and silent and enviable they were, those people who all their lives could stay still, with no need to do or say anything remarkable." (77)
"I floated beside him in his big cream and chocolate clean-smelling car, ..." (80)
"I thought she was an idiot, and yet I frantically admired her, was grateful for every little colourless pebble of a word she dropped." (82)
"The question of whether God existed or not never came up in church." (91)
"The idea of God did not connect for me with any idea of being good, which is perhaps odd, considering all about sins and wickedness that I did listen to. I believed in being saved by faith alone, by some great grab of the soul, But did I really, did I really want it to happen to me? Yes and no. I wanted it to happen, but I saw it would have to be a secret. How could I go on living with my Mother and Father and Fern Dogherty and my friend Naomi and everybody in Jubilee otherwise?" (95)
"I was happy in the Library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds, this was a comfort to me. It was the opposite with Naomi; so many books weighed on her, making her feel oppressed and suspicious." (111)
"I was always betraying someone or somebody; it seemed the only way to get along." (112)
"His presence was essential but blurred; in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electricity like a blue fluorescent light." (145)
"And this was what I expected sexual communication to be like - a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances." (152)
" "Oh, I wasn't in danger of marriage." "You had your singing. You had your interest in life." "I was just usually having too good a time. I knew enough about marriage to know that's when your good times stop." "(161)
"..."There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals." " (164)
" "...Once you make the mistake of being - distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does." (165)
"Well groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn't like to even go near them... Nor would be coarseness ever be translated into their fineness; it was too late, the difference lay too deep for that." (167)
"...I was shaken, imagining the other surrender, more tempting, more gorgeous even than the surrender to sex - the hero's, the patriot's, Carmen's surrender to the final importance of gesture, image, self-created self." (171)
"I liked the word mistress, a full-skirted word, with some ceremony about it; a mistress should not be too slim." (172)
"Men and boys hung around the steps. I could not see their faces, and did not look. I just saw their cigarettes or belt buckles or bottles glinting in the dark." (174)
"I felt happy. I was no longer responsible for anything. I am drunk, I thought." (177)
"I found the bathroom and used it without closing the door, later remembering." (179)
" "You think you're too good for anything. Any of us." "I don't!"... I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was - in play, that I meant to keep him sewed up in his golden lover's skin forever, even if five minutes before I had talked about marrying him. ... I opened my mouth to say whatever would make it clear to him, and I saw that he knew it already; this was what he knew, that I had somehow met his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not, matched my complexity and play-acting to his true intent." (222)
"If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, ... We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, carious ways, then love some more." (223-224)
"I turned around, went back into the hall to look in the dim mirror at my twisted wet face. Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering." (225)
"I opened up it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.
Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French.
"People's wishes, and their offerings, were what I took then naturally, a bit distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due. "Yes," I said, instead of thank-you." (237)
romaincrisis
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