Maureen Howard Quotes
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To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love.
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It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.
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I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.
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The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.
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Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.
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Acceptance is the word we must substitute for dependence in dealing with the aged. Their acceptance of help, ours of their need.
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The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.
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I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have.
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I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom of some cruelly bred plant; admiration for the world spread for the world to see on my gullible face-unlike my other face with the sour look of a starved peasant.
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There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed.
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When I go home my mother and I play a cannibal game; we eat each other over the years, tender morsel by morsel until there is nothing left but dry bone and wig. She is winning-needless to say she has had so much more experience.
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The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.
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Wouldn't a laugh serve us better than to battle it out with our mortal souls?
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None of the adults I knew ever touched in public, much less kneaded each others flesh.
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If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.
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To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois.
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Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative.
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Even when I was a grown woman, he [Father] would leave me on the edge of hysteria in all our arguments: though I married and lived as far as I could spiritually from Bridgeport, he reduced me in a matter of hours to a wriggling child, pleading to go free.
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