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In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays QUOTES

In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays QUOTES

1 " It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper. "

― Katie Roiphe , In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

2 " I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as "the Graham Greene Suite." Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid's cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn't help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene's seediness - he later regretted popularising the word "seedy" - and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. The Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn't been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books. "

― Katie Roiphe , In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

3 " But the break is still there, not visible but there, the break where you find in yourself the ability to walk away from everything you have known; the break is thrilling, liberating, and, as Alexis says, a little like dying. Alexis describes her mother as "

― Katie Roiphe , In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

4 " boys. If I wanted to I could delve further into the great gaping insecurity that is always responsible for this sort of bad behavior: when I was thirteen I was very ill, and in and out of the hospital for a year. By the time it was clear I was going to be all right, I weighed sixty-two pounds. While my friends were cultivating the usual romantic dramas, I read books, and resigned myself to not being part of the game; and this resignation, this astonishment that a boy would like me, lingered dangerously. It turned me into something of a monster for a little while. Somehow this feeling that I was outside the romantic comings and goings of my peers got mingled with the idea that I wasn’t going to live, that I was somehow outside of life. You can see where I am going with this. You can feel, in this explanation, the silent doctor nodding in the corner. So many exquisite explanations of appalling pieces of selfishness. And yet they are all true and not true; it may just have been a warm night and a beautiful boy. "

― Katie Roiphe , In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays