Writers And Lovers Lily King Quotes

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.

You don't realize how much effort you've put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.

It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore

Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

It's always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,' Fabiana says. 'It always is.

If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.

They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.

It´s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.

It's a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

I've forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country - death, war, guns, illness - our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight-point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It's improv. Which is funny, because aren't we just improvising all day long? Isn't our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?

I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.

I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for. But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay. The geese don't care that I'm crying again. They're used to it.

you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn't love them anymore.

But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can’t tell her. That’s the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her that I’m okay.

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for.

I stopped having expectations about achieving anything long ago.

I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.

That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature

I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.

I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that's still inside me.

He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught. I believed she'd sent him to me as a gift to help me through.

Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality.’ ‘“Between the idea and the reality/Between the motion and the act/Falls the Shadow,

God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.

All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams.

The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it’s hard to know what to say next.

I'm scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal.

It's good to get whacked open at least once, though,' she says. 'You can't really love from inside a big, thick shell.

I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter. I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.

I'm usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing." "From heartbreak?" "Yeah." My throat is closing. "I can usually get out of the way before it hits me straight on." "That's not really heartbreak then, is it?

I spend the night that way, passing through layers of anxiety, humiliation, and despair. Somewhere close to dawn I lose some consciousness. It isn’t sleep exactly, but I have to think of it as sleep because it’s all I ever get anymore.

My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you've coaxed it out of her, it's hard not to always believe it. I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It's different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don't know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don't know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

The geese are all asleep. A few tip their heads out from under their wings as we approach. I open the cookie tin and a few more sway slowly over to us. It’s cold, and Silas has wrapped the green blanket around me so I feel like I have wings, too.

I’ll miss them when they take flight. I won’t be there. Their fast excited chatter, their wings finally spread wide, their feet tucking in behind them. Wheels up. I’ll miss it. I’ll be in class or at my desk or in bed when they cut across the sky.

She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel's colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men.

It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring. Maybe that's all it was.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.

I know you are drunk on youth and immortality, but this is how you die

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.

I'm done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don't know or can't tell you what they want. I'm done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

Halfway across the river I hoist myself on the wide parapet, swing my legs over the edge, and look down in the water for Quentin’s body. How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she’s ever known? How do you create a character like that?

I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality. 'Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Falls the Shadow,' he says. Listen to your stentorian teacher voice. I do feel like I'm shrinking the Shadow a bit.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, 'Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.' And now she's dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

When my mother died, I sort of felt her inside me sometimes,’ I say. ‘Like I’d swallowed her.’ He laughs. ‘Swallowed her.’ ‘I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter.

And if we took away Brian's salary at Schwab and your dad's little allowance, how much money would you have working part-time at that non-profit? Would you be able to afford Bermuda or your two-bedroom in SoHo? Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?

I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

My mother was a real person. I am not a real person.

It’s always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,’ Fabiana says. ‘It always is.

He has called to ask you out on a date. Do not mention a dead mother.

He seems genuinely happy for me. You can’t always count on a guy for that.

That’s the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her that I’m okay.

Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule.

Lynn didn’t know my mother, but she’s the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

I don't know how everyone else is getting by, paying their bills, and sleeping through the night.

I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse.

It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was.

But they are also life giving. They impregnate flowers, and they give us our food supply. They work as a collective. Plus they are responsible for the line: “And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.

I try to write something new. It’s bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn’t feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

He calls me his waif, his down-on-her-luck waitress, but he takes it all lightly. In fact, Holly Golightly is one of his names for me. If we lived together I would expose myself as the blighted Jean Rhys character I really am.

The Irish essayist has us close our eyes and listen to the words she says without trying to control our thoughts. I keep mine open a crack, to scan the packed room. He’s not here. ‘A rainy day,’ she says. My mother and me running from the Mustang to the house. ‘The sound of a musical instrument.’ Caleb playing the guitar. ‘An act of love.’ My father cleaning my golf clubs in the kitchen sink. She has us write about one of these moments that come up unbidden, unforced.

I meet Silas at the movie theater on Church Street. We choose seats close to the front. He's wearing a striped wool hat that he keeps on the whole movie, and our bodies never touch. I've never been more aware of not touching someone in my life.

I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.

Silas leaves me a message, then another, and I don't call back. I've made my choice. I'm done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don't know or can't tell you what they want. I'm done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

I'd had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don't start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself as we turned the corner, the dog pulling toward something ahead, his nails loud on the sidewalk. It's not supposed to be good or complete. It's okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast spreading goo I can't manage, I told myself. It's okay that I'm not sure what's next, that it might be something unexpected.

He has us draw a floor plan of the first place we ever remember living. ‘The rooms, the closets, the hallway,’ he says as he draws one himself on the blackboard. He turns back to us and says, ‘Now add the significant details: the couch, the bourbon bottle, the slot between the wall and the fridge.’ He laughs. ‘You see? I’ve already told you my whole childhood in three details.’ He jogs to the left and writes in block letters: NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.

Once we have our details—our white-hot places of experience he calls them—we have to choose one and write about it. ‘Not in sentences but in bursts of feelings—phrases, words, don’t worry how they relate just get them out. You are vomiting here.’ I circle my mother’s bathroom and start writing about it—the greasy face lotion, the dry shampoo spray, the heavy razor, the amber bottle of Chanel No. 5—and all the things that became mine the day she left.

I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating.

Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself as we turned the corner, the dog pulling toward something ahead, his nails loud on the sidewalk. It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected.

So what are you scared of?' he asks me at our last appointment. 'I mean really scared of.' I try to think about it. 'I'm scared that if I can't even handle this right now, how will I be able to handle bigger things in the future?' He nods. He scrapes his moustache against his thumbs. 'Bigger things in the future. What's bigger than this? Your mother dies suddenly. It echoes her previous abandonment of you thus making her death a double whammy. Your father proved to be incapable of being your father. You owe money to several large corporations who will squeeze you indefinitely. You spent six years writing a novel that may or may not get published. You got fired from your job. You say you want a family of your own but there doesn't seem to be a man in your life, and you may have fertility problems. I don't know, my friend. This is not nothing.' Of all his strange responses, this is the one that helps me the most. This is not nothing.

There’s a bit of clapping, and I walk up to the podium. I see a few clusters of students I teach and many others I don’t know. Their faces are lifted up at me. I think of Holden Caulfield, wanting to catch children before they fall off the cliff, and I get it now. I take a long breath. A kid from eleventh grade gives a little whoop. ‘Thank you, Brad,’ I say into the mic. ‘Your grade just went way up.’ There are so many more people than I had imagined. But it can’t be that much harder than reciting the specials to an impatient ten-top at Iris. Plus, I want to tell these kids the things I’ve written down. My lips tremble and my voice hops around a bit, but I get it out. I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.

I’ve forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.

look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating.

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

My old friends are getting married, too. The invitations catch up with me eventually, forwarded from Oregon or Spain or Albuquerque. Unfortunately, sometimes these invitations arrive before the wedding has taken place.

I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying more to think about sex.

My parents were married twenty-three years and never made it look appealing.

Paco had one of his books I think, and I didn't much like the writers Paco did, men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she’s ever known? How do you create a character like that?

thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

The writing has that stark lucidity of someone trying to tell you the truest thing they know.

She wraps an arm around me and pulls me in tight. ‘I know how you feel. You know I do. It’s good to get whacked open at least once, though,’ she says. ‘You can’t really love from inside a big thick shell.