Home > Author > Idra Novey
1 " To have made a coat of words and cloaked yourself in it. "
― Idra Novey , Ways to Disappear
2 " Un uomo capace di fare silenzio, è un uomo capace di iniziare. "
3 " 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. "
4 " Desire, Beatriz had written, was what a man will deny himself until he can't. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
― Idra Novey , Those Who Knew
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " What political favors were not ultimately about pig shit and how to get rid of it? "
10 " To kiss a man who understood none of the connotations of her country had been like a vacation from herself. "
11 " 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. "
12 " Why you married this monster is beyond me. "
13 " How could he be both of these men? "
14 " The second woman had seemed just as bull-like and resentful. "
15 " 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. "
16 " 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. "
17 " There was really no predicting where, or when, the least lonely years of one’s adult life might begin. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " To win, you have to hide what you have more of than anyone else. "
