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1 " Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire. "
― Nell Zink , Mislaid
2 " The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives… "
3 " When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future. "
4 " Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower social class – which she was. A woman. "
5 " He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. "
6 " The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead. "
7 " You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois. "
8 " It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth. "
9 " There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement. "
10 " They should build a monument,” Cary said. “All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public. "
11 " But quand même. The best things in life are free. A round of billiards with sailors is more beautiful than Charleston in springtime, if they’re the right sailors. "
12 " So many men, so little parking. "
13 " Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens. "
14 " College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life—literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain. "
15 " Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. "
16 " Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity. "
17 " Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. "
18 " Over milk and cookies after Karen’s return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. “You’re a cipher,” she said. “A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays.” “I want to get good grades and go to college.” “And what are you going to do when you get there?” “How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it’s like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don’t know what they are. Like ‘sociology.’ What is it? "
19 " She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. "
20 " If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key. "
