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Frances and Bernard QUOTES

Frances and Bernard QUOTES

1 " Dear Uncle Bernard -
Your niece Frances - a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat - thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I've never been one to spend time thinking about why men and women take to each other, or why they don't. I think it can turn a lady neurotic, a term I despise but also am loath to have turned in my direction. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

2 " I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

3 " I'd send a peach pie through the mail but I trust only Jersey peaches and it looks like they don't let them into the city. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

4 " Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you're thinking bloom upon your face, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

5 " A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

6 " I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more that I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did- I mean, I didn't want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

7 " It makes me think that a marriage of true minds - to again quote Shakespeare - is in many ways just dumb luck. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

8 " But women are awful for the same reason men are awful: limited scope. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

9 " You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

10 " She will find it less necessary to carve out of you what needs to be carved out because she has someone else now who needs her knife. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

11 " Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson — American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

12 " ...but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

13 " You had the radiance of someone who knew her worth and would not squander it. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard

14 " ... when I am walking down the street to meet him and I know that I have come into his view, and his eyes, as I approach, are giving off sparks of both hunger and affection, the two fighting it out like cats in his pupils, I feel that I would do anything to have that look cast upon me for the rest of my days. I feel that I am known more intimately than perhaps God knows me. And now I have blasphemed, so please burn this letter. "

― Carlene Bauer , Frances and Bernard