Either/Or Quotes
"But it was too late—I had already thought of it."
"I hope you will tell me why I am so horrible, so that I can defend myself."
"I wonder how much of wanderlust is just regular lust."
"A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself."
"I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part."
"You didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art."
"Her father and mother had not lived happily together; what usually beckons, more or less clearly or vaguely, to a young girl does not beckon to her."
"All human knowledge was in it, hidden in the form of its classification."
"Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all."
"Was it necessary to be cruel to be great or a genius or an effective person?"
"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. Then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two."
"What if I meet the one who sees me as the devil?"
"Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday."
"I wish I could write a book like that about Nadja, where I could explain each line."
"Everything in the Arctic Circle was hugely magnified and prominent, like someone’s giant grotesque forehead."
"It’s not an argument you want to get into—believe me."
"Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive."
"To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic."
"I wandered the halls... That was exactly it: not the streets, like a flâneur, but the halls."
"I felt the heavy gears start behind my eyes and in my sinuses."
"Listening to my Walkman and smoking a cigarette by the river, I felt a kind of elevation in my chest, my eyes opened wider, I felt more alive."
"I tried and failed to 'power through.' So: I wasn’t even allowed to exhaust my body."
"But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?"
"The minute you tried to talk about anything interesting, he would swiftly, good-naturedly, inexorably change the subject back to one of the three kinds of things he ever talked about."
"I had a belief that I had always cried this much. Hadn’t we all laughed about it, when I was three?"
"Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language."
"So what are you supposed to do? Not use words?"
"Well, they say that women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony."
"I never had been a huge fan of free play or chaos. Nor did I feel like my main problem with other people or the external world was an excess of logic."
"What if I didn’t want to collaborate that way? What if I wanted to use logic, by myself, in an 'objective' way—without mothers or menstrual blood?"
"A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read."
"My mother got me a referral to a psychiatrist in one of the gazillion teaching hospitals in Boston."
"The longer we talked, the more I felt like he was asking me for some kind of advice or information."
"The impetus for faking was more complicated than it seemed. It wasn’t just to relieve Matt’s performance anxiety. It was also about Svetlana’s anxiety."
"I wondered whether I was having resistance. Was he telling me things I had repressed for some reason? If I accepted them, would I feel better?"
"But if you acted like nothing was happening, you floated on a magical cushion of invisibility."
"The thought of writing anything about my bed—brimming with foam earplugs, overhung by the duct-taped 'canopy,' with a roll of toilet paper wedged against the wall—was deeply dispiriting."
"Marriage was arranged marriage. 'What if you don’t want to get married?' 'But I do want to. I think living alone is really difficult, especially for a woman.'"
"But what if I made this guy feel that way? I looked at him. He didn’t seem especially stressed-out. Maybe it was OK, since I wasn’t his mother."
"So, here was the thing everyone kept talking about: his 'desire,' that was tangible and real. Was it really in some way about me?"
"The beauty of a gin and tonic lay precisely in its simplicity."
"The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that?"
"The clocks had just been turned forward. It was five past seven."
"He wasn’t going anywhere. I should take my time."
"Nobody ever wrote anything like that to me before."
"We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do."
"It was like slipping back into the water again after lying on hot sand."
"A series of expressions moved across his face."
"We might have to try something a little unorthodox."
"Walking down the damp street, I felt both wide awake and unprecedentedly still."
"People said you had to be careful whom you lost your virginity to, because you would become attached."
"They said you never forgot your first time, but they didn’t say whether the other person forgot your first time."
"What do people ever do but torture each other?"
"How could a key even be a key if they were all the same?"
"I am not sure it's not a greater happiness to be powerless."
"For weak people I have no doubt it's a greater happiness."
"The supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating other people than they are for appreciating you."
"One had to put it to good use—or what shame, what dishonor!"
"You are not the bride or the groom. You do not fit in a house with a family."
"Now that she was in the secret...the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness."
"Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven."
"If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee."