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21 " You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. "
― Zadie Smith , On Beauty
22 " Any woman who counts on her face is a fool. "
23 " Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people. "
24 " I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. "
25 " I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for. "
26 " The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. "
27 " This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons? "
28 " He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. "
29 " It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy "
30 " She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune. "
31 " In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time. "
32 " Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half. "
33 " Each couple is its own vaudeville act. "
34 " And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared. "
35 " ...'this is real. This life. We're really here - this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it's real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that's a real thing and it hurts me. "
36 " He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. "
37 " It was a kiss from the past. "
38 " How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything? "
39 " This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give. "
40 " You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me. "