The Dying Animal Quotes
"Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else."
"Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself."
"She gives to art, to all of art, far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn't without its poignant appeal."
"Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out?"
"The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything about the other person."
"How to be serious over a lifetime about one’s modest, private pleasures."
"It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives."
"Sometimes one is halfway through the next stage before one realizes that one has entered it."
"To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are."
"Nothing, nothing is put to rest, however old a man may be."
"You’re not getting what you want even when you’re getting what you want."
"How do I know a young man will take her away? Because I once was the young man who would have done it."
"Ordinary pornography is the aestheticizing of jealousy."
"I see him. I know him. I know what he is capable of doing because he is me at twenty-five."
"Her permissions flow from looking in the mirror and saying, 'Someone else must see this.'"
"Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged."
"She was for me an exciting hybrid of the intelligent, tremulous, daring pioneer."
"Most people bring to bed with them the worst of their biography—Carolyn brought only the best."
"The erratic mob was there, but as it happened, I had to open the door myself."
"George feels pure only in his transgressions. His obedient side makes him sick."
"I knew it was a difficult escape, and I knew I could take only myself over the wall."
"Parents play a legendary role in the minds of their children."
"Coupled life and family life bring out everything that’s childish in everyone involved."
"He who forms a tie is lost, attachment is my enemy."
"One either imposes one’s ideas or one is imposed on."
"Providing you're not in a state of longing, living in solitude can be its own powerful pleasure."
"One doesn’t need the whole of society on one’s side."
"Their heroism is not only in stoically enduring the dailiness of their renunciations but in diligently presenting a counterfeit image of their lives."
"The true lives, the unhidden lives, exist for their therapists alone."
"Maybe they reserve their confidences for one another, though I wonder—I don’t know that male solidarity extends very far these days."
"I’m not contending that they’re all antagonistic and wish me ill because of the way I live, but it’s safe to say that I don’t universally compel admiration."
"With George dead, my solidarity is now entirely with women like Elena who once were girlfriends."
"I am 'a limited man,' they tell me—they who are not limited."
"But imagine the sport she could have made of me were she not too well reared a girl ever to exploit to the limit the Amazonian strength of her endowment."
"Instability had merely to enter her cozy Cuban family life with the predictable death of a beloved old grandfather to set rapidly in motion a cascade of misfortune culminating in cancer."
"My chances," she said, "are sixty percent to survive and forty percent to die."
"And then she dropped into the talk about how life is so worthwhile and how she feels sorry for her mother, above all—the banal talk that’s inevitable."
"It takes a certain type of woman to know that. Most have complaints about something that they needn’t complain about."
"Getting old is unimaginable to anyone but the aging."
"The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order."