Idra Novey Quotes

To have made a coat of words and cloaked yourself in it.

Desire, Beatriz had written, was what a man will deny himself until he can't.

What political favors were not ultimately about pig shit and how to get rid of it?

To have stayed awake for two nights watching your grown child sleep, a child who you'd forced too early to be an adult and who'd grown thick from it the way a vine will.

She had a delicate, chiseled face but there was something ferocious about her, too—a scrutiny of the world so intense it bordered on sensual.

that she was trailing him because trauma made a kite of the mind and there was no telling what kind of wind might take hold of it.

To kiss a man who understood none of the connotations of her country had been like a vacation from herself.

He wondered what it would take for there to be a true reckoning with the repressive roles men imposed on each other, a moment when acting despotic would finally be recognized as the weakness that it was.

The world made no exception for lovers.

...grabbing a woman’s wrist for a second couldn’t implicate a man.

Sex just once in his mother’s sweltering apartment and that would be it. When they opened the door, however, the apartment wasn’t sweltering at all. It was cool, the air-conditioning humming in every room, though Emma was certain she had turned it off before leaving for Ilha Grande. Raquel must have come by and forgotten to turn it off, Marcus said. Come here. He pulled at her hips until she tilted toward him. If they’d been standing anywhere but in front of her author’s bookshelves, the titles she’d run her fingers over for years like sacred scrolls, Emma was sure she would have had more restraint, would not be lifting her own dress this way over her head. When Marcus slid her polka-dot underwear down over her knees, she murmured something about thinking about this a little more. But she didn’t want to think. She wanted to fling her underwear down the hall with her toe. So she did, and the motion was divine. Now there was nothing in the way.

To see enough through the fractured glass in your lens to know even in her sleep she is uneasy with you now, abhors the heavy coat you found on a bench which is hideous but you can't let go of it for its pockets.

To kiss her author’s son just once, atop a pile of emergency rafts, didn’t have to mean anything. Unless she did it again. And then again in the last row of the bus back to Rio. And in the taxi from the bus terminal, in the brief darkness of the tunnel into Copacabana. This will have to stop, she said. As for Marcus, he left his hand where it was, between her legs.

E se le sue dita avessero fallito il compito, se i suoi pensieri si fossero rivelati indegni di essere scritti, chi l’avrebbe saputo? Era sola con tutte le ore della sua vita.

Un uomo capace di fare silenzio, è un uomo capace di iniziare.

In a crumbling park in the crumbling back end of Copacabana, a woman stopped under an almond tree with a suitcase and a cigar. She

She had assured him she’d told no one about her trips to his apartment, but she was a girl, and girls were feline, always purring up to one another with their secrets.

He’d signed up for some cheap language classes to better grasp what was going on—how to reply, for example, when two drunk women in what looked like painted Santa beards asked if he’d come to join their revolution.

Wasn’t this one of the ways women unraveled? They failed to marry at the expected age, they got lonelier, stuck on some ex-lover’s success while they remained trapped in one demoralizing position after another, their thoughts growing increasingly erratic and unhinged.

She kissed the top of her friend’s head and it felt maternal, sensual—that fragile, erotic overlap that can happen in an embrace between two people who have gradually become essential to one another but have yet to speak of it, and who will likely never speak of all the shoved-down wadded-up things they have come to silently glimpse inside each other.

trauma made a kite of the mind and there was no telling what kind of wind might take hold of it.

As Victor had done at every moment of remorse or shame in the past decade, he blamed Lena.

I could describe it, how I was walking up Trinity that night and saw Victor push her in front of that bus. Except you didn't see him do that, Olga pointed out, insisting Lena come up to the bookstore to talk this through. You just have a hunch...

Olga felt the least capable of being alive when it was overcast.

I don't need your fucking scone!

... he'd felt a joy so delicate it felt invented, some new kind of twenty-first-century joy, so unexpected...

Already in your last term in political science, he said, how excellent. I hope you'll consider something with the government when you graduate. I mean that. We really need more smart young women in office--in absolutely every position. When the girl sucked in her breath, Victor suggested she contact his office the following spring about working on his reelection campaign. We'll just be getting started. He met her eyes and watched her nervously flick her hair again, felt his body willing itself closer. But then a diesel bus roared to a stop along the edge of the park just behind them. At the sound of its hissing brakes, he stepped away.

It was an embrace that spoke of history, of deep affection, the kind of genuine embrace he'd missed in this year of wandering, and before it in the small city where he'd been living and knew almost no one. Wasn't that the cost, above all, of his habitual dissatisfaction--of having no deeper continuous history with anyone beyond his bitterly divorced parents, and one culinary school friend who'd kept him on her group emails? With envy, he watched Lena stop again to speak to a couple by the door.

But, once again, Lena had wound herself too tightly around her own version to question it. In her adamant, emphatic way, Lena insisted...

A school she visited the month before had not even had a working water fountain. In the classroom she'd observed there, two windows had been patched with masking tape and cardboard. Halfway through the class, a scrawny, feral-looking cat had slipped beneath the cardboard and hissed at a boy seated near the window. The teacher remarked on none of it. He'd just gone on lecturing in a resigned monotone until the cat drew closer and the boy smacked it with a notebook.

Why you married this monster is beyond me.

How could he be both of these men?

The second woman had seemed just as bull-like and resentful.

To win, you have to hide what you have more of than anyone else.

There was really no predicting where, or when, the least lonely years of one’s adult life might begin.