Home > Author > Leni Zumas
1 " Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past. "
― Leni Zumas , Red Clocks
2 " She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people. "
3 " The comparing mind is a despairing mind. "
4 " What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people! "
5 " The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. "
6 " But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy? The world will care. "
7 " She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most people. "
8 " Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man's genetic material? "
9 " Whatever frees Gin Percival to leave her hair twiggy and wear shapeless sack dresses and smell unwashed—the wife wants that. "
10 " Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for. "
11 " By walking, she tells her students, is how you make the road. "
12 " Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?'A few faces smile, uneasy.Even louder: 'How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result? "
13 " But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. "
14 " She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. "
15 " Why does she even want one? How can she tell her students to reject the myth that their happiness depends on having a mate if she believes the same myth about having a child? Why isn't she glad, as Eivor Minervudottir was glad, to be free? "
16 " humans like to name these things normal and those things peculiar. "
17 " For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. Virginia Woolf "
18 " In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. "
19 " Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each time she opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat. "
20 " The comparing mind is a despairing mind, "
