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Claire Dederer QUOTES

Claire Dederer QUOTES

1 " I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

2 " Our anxieties were driving us to become other people-he was Earner; I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. We both worried all the time and often didn't remember to laugh. I could find relief in the baby's smile, or with my friends, or now, in yoga. I didn't see that Bruce was headed someplace where there was no relief. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

3 " Our anxieties were driving us to become other people—he was Earner; I was
Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

4 " Yoga is just gymnastics for uncoordinated people. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

5 " I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: "Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling."

Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, "Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again."

Fear. I hadn't even known it was there. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

6 " Jonathan's voice was quiet now. "Thank you for sharing this evening with me. In yoga, we say 'Namaste,' which means 'I bow to the divine in you.'" He bowed his dork-knobbed head and said, "Namaste." We bowed back and mumbled, "Namaste." On my tongue, the new word felt as though it contained its own foreign spice. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

7 " Jess herself seemed resolutely asexual, though I later of torrid affairs, and complex intrigues. This quality of holding back was very important for me to see. She'd held herself apart a little. She didn't pretend she wasn't beautiful, there was nothing coy in her, but she wasn't very interested in using her beauty's power. That fascinated me. I had never thought of that as an option. Just letting your beauty lie around, unused. She was a model of a different way of being. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

8 " What if the opposite of good wasn't bad? What if the opposite of good was real? "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

9 " Reality is an easy commodity in the Front Range. There's weather, and there are animals that are thinking about eating you, and there's all that beauty. It sort of whomps you on the head. It's strange that we use the word "unreal" to describe beauty-it's my experience that beauty drags us by the hair into the real. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

10 " No matter where you go in the world, a German will have beaten you there, clad in a sweaty black T-shirt and a smug expression. "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

11 " Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

12 " There’s really no dignified way to go to seed as a woman. "

― Claire Dederer

13 " Machiavellian "

― Claire Dederer , Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

14 " Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff? "

― Claire Dederer

15 " If you’re not a good cook by the time you’re our age it’s a serious character defect, and it means something bad, something ungenerous, about your personality. Sorry to break the news. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

16 " Food was wearisome. We’d been dealing with food, planning it buying it growing it storing it cooking it serving it, for years, for decades now. By the time it was our moment to eat, we were sick of the sight of it. Fuck food. Food looked a little better, though, when it wasn’t inside our houses. We bought salads with meat in them because we knew we needed protein—it was as if we were our own toddlers. The way I remembered it, that was the main objective with toddlers: the posting of protein into them. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

17 " Don't worry about your orgasm. Don't care about it. You've had a million orgasms in your life. Want only this. Want only total obliteration. In this way too, you are returning to the girl you were -- the girl who didn't care about orgasms, but just wanted to fuck, and fuck, and fuck, without even knowing why. Those adult years of dutifully chasing clitoral orgasms -- they seem alien in retrospect. Now you just want sensation, less definable than orgasm, and weirdly more satisfying, more total. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

18 " When the subject was 14, late in the year of 1980, she began to pursue male attention, like the cartoon cat who turns around and begins to chase the dog. From there on out, her pursuit was dedicated, the subject was never without a boyfriend, or several. She seemed to need to stack them, like cordwood, for winter. Sexual activity was ongoing, occasionally fervent, but usually desultory, or mechanical, or dutiful. What this study is attempting to ascertain is why. Why did she do this? "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

19 " The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. "

― Claire Dederer

20 " An aside on the question of pleasure. The subject didn't really get much pleasure from all this fornicating she was doing. The compulsion wasn't to feel good, it was to enjoy the feeling of making someone want her, of making someone else feel good. Frequency of condition was high, in fact constant. "

― Claire Dederer , Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning