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The Folded Clock: A Diary QUOTES

The Folded Clock: A Diary QUOTES

21 " In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called “desire lines.” Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

22 " In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn't. The winner isn't necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won't give up, and the non-winner ("loser" is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

23 " The Googling that might occur before dinner parties, however, confuses me more than the Googling of dead wives, especially since I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn't that the mark of a failed dinner party? When the conversations resemble job interviews? Wouldn't it actually be preferable, thus, to request that everyone Google the other guests beforehand so our tedious biographies won't need teasing out in person? "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

24 " Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You’re stuck in a cave with three other people—all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw—and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must biologically be compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

25 " Bookshelves of summer houses are filled with dishy nonsense. They indicate how a person understands time is meant to be wasted. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

26 " When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

27 " Why do I need credit for my desire? It's ridiculous. But I do. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

28 " Days were ages. Loved bloomed and died in a day. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

29 " Sometimes I don't think any of us really believes anything we say; we are just defending our kind. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

30 " Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but that can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

31 " In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn’t. The winner isn’t necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won’t give up, and the non-winner (“loser” is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

32 " In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There’s nothing she hasn’t thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

33 " My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn’t Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he’s been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he’d have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She’d cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

34 " A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it’s just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

35 " I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I’d always worried that I’d naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

36 " We've known Emily, my husband and I, for two full seasons. We first met her on The Bachelor, Season Fifteen; she competed with seventeen other girls for the heart of Brad, such as it was. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

37 " Getting jobs is like winning domestic arguments on a grand scale, and then getting paid for it. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

38 " Sometimes when you are in a foreign country it feels like everyone is in on a joke against you. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary

39 " I know people often fail to find disgusting or shameful the revealing grime and sloth of their own lives. "

― Heidi Julavits , The Folded Clock: A Diary