Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.
O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we’re chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.
The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
I saw the movie,” he said. “I know what it’s about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so”—he leaned toward us—”their tits bleed.
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
Virgin suicideWhat was that she cried?No use in stayin’On this holocaust rideShe gave me her cherryShe’s my virgin suicide
I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.
At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…
Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
They thought depression was like bieng ‘depressed’. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.
He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.
Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.
When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.
They made us participate in their own madness,because we couldn’t help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
I mean, in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we’re born.
It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.
We realized that the version of the world [our parents] rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.
College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.
This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.
Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.
Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.
For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.
Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.
It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.
She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.