Fear Of Flying Quotes
"Women trembled between the old world and the new."
"Men still ruled the roost and women still wanted to please them."
"Female lust had a nasty habit of turning into love, as male lust did not."
"Broken hearts littered the highways down which the powerful and lordly men of the new generation strode."
"Women could not look to literature for an answer about how to navigate this new world."
"The eruption was so powerful that it pushed feminism into its 'second stage'—in which women were to lose so much of their automatic deference to men."
"The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal."
"You are what you dream. You are what you daydream."
"Who can explain why the same action disgusts you in one case and thrills you in another?"
"Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control."
"Parents and children are umbilically attached and not only in the womb."
"I had more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream."
"To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like."
"I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself."
"But who can debate taste anyway? And who can convey an infatuation?"
"For God’s sake, you’re probably right! But you’re enough of an Ethel Kennedy for one family—why the hell do we need any more?"
"I guess … but the curiosity isn’t exactly killing me."
"Oh, God, you really can’t stand anyone to do anything but what you’ve done."
"Like bringing up your children to think they’re Catholics, like lying about your religion, like denying who you are …"
"Being an only child is supposed to be such a psychological hardship, but it was all I ever wished for as a child."
"A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche."
"What I really wanted was to give birth to myself—the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world."
"Was a child any guarantee against loneliness or pain? Was anything?"
"Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself."
"Already there are light furrows in my forehead."
"The smile takes longer to fade. As if aging were, above all, rigidity."
"It will still be going strong when nobody wants the rest of me at all."
"A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby."
"The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me."
"Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment."
"The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears. The hostage of my false definitions."
"Far better to be an intellectual nun than that."
"The intellectual nun was no fun either. She had no juice."
"I walked out of the closet and confronted Pierre."
"We were attracted to men, but when it came to understanding and good talk, we needed each other."
"Pia and I were 'free women' (a phrase which means nothing without quotes)."
"Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man?"
"The whole episode was wordless—as if the three of us were in a pantomime together and each had rehearsed his part for so many years that it was second nature."
"There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist."
"Artists are horrible. 'Never, never get involved with a man who wants to be an artist,' my mother used to say, who knew."
"She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one."
"I am really the most beautiful girl in the world to her, aren’t I?"
"All my drawings, greeting cards, cartoons, posters, oil paintings presage future greatness to her."
"My mother believed in free love, in dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne."
"I learned what an orgasm was from D. H. Lawrence."
"I learned from Freud that they have deficient superegos and are ever 'incomplete'."
"I was furious with my mother for not teaching me how to be a woman."
"Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside."
"Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex."
"Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights."
"Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability … I believed in them too."
"Our itinerary had no geographical rhyme or reason."
"Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it."
"What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated?"
"I wanted to kill him or myself. Instead I cried."
"Will Bach go? Will Milton go? Will Shakespeare go?"
"The lights bulbs will go to heaven! They will! They will!"
"All I know is that when he finally let go, I was shaking all over and gasping for breath."
"A Sunday in June and if you want to get sick, you’d better do it at a beach resort."
"Insanity was no one’s fault. It was an act of God."
"All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence."
"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast."
"You never seem to remember that you made an attempt on my life, do you?"
"If you loved me—if you knew the goddamned meaning of sacrifice—if you weren’t such a spoiled brat."
"I feel sorry for you. You’re so damned weak."
"I knew I never quite trusted him again after the attempt he made to strangle me."
"Somewhere deep inside my head is some glorious image of the ideal woman."
"A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness."
"My father was popping Libriums by the minute and admonishing me to be brave."
"Certainly the doctors’ categories of health and sickness were almost crazier than Brian’s."
"It’s all a question of faith. It has always been a question of faith."
"You’ve forgotten everything you knew. They’ve brainwashed you too."
"I hadn’t the taste for total self-annihilation. I would never be a romantic heroine maybe, but I would stay alive."
"People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves."
"You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul."
"It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait."
"I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working."
"I wanted to lose myself in a man, to cease to be me, to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings."
"We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time."