Lily King Quotes

Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy. When I tried to explain that my grandmother was my imagined audience for Children of the KK, I think he was embarrassed for me. These conversations with B keep coming back. Perhaps because Fen doesn't enjoy talking about work with me anymore. I feel him withholding, as if he thinks I'll use his ideas in my next book if he says them out loud.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

I wasn't sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.

Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible.

It came to him that he didn't like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . .

I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.

She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. Look at Malinowski, she said. Look at Boas. They defined their cultures as they saw them, as they understood the natives' point of view. The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is "natural." 'Even if I manage that, the next person who comes here will tell a different story about the Kiona.' 'No doubt.' 'Then what is the point?' I said. 'This is no different from the laboratory. What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

I know you are drunk on youth and immortality, but this is how you die

I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers.

I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. 'Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.' She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny. 'I love you,' she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.

I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. 'I cannot make this bag fast enough,' she said. We all fell over laughing.

But you can't have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she's Southern but she's not on the Grid. She's a different type altogether. Trust me on that one.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. What

I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come.

he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother's body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

Both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them.

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.

There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion – you've only been there eight weeks – and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

A year and a half up that little tributary somewhere?' Tillie said. 'Good God,

They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.

It´s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you

Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country - death, war, guns, illness - our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight-point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It's improv. Which is funny, because aren't we just improvising all day long? Isn't our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?

Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?

It's always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,' Fabiana says. 'It always is.

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.

You don't struggle with these questions?"

"No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have."

"An American flaw.

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

-Can we have one day when we don't have to talk about the meaning of life?
-I don't think we ever talk about anything else.

I didn't want to miss the euphoria. I haven't, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

I'd had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don't start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself as we turned the corner, the dog pulling toward something ahead, his nails loud on the sidewalk. It's not supposed to be good or complete. It's okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast spreading goo I can't manage, I told myself. It's okay that I'm not sure what's next, that it might be something unexpected.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.

I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught. I believed she'd sent him to me as a gift to help me through.

I felt in some ways we'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words...

You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist.

I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed.

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

I always think of that Eliot poem, about the vision and the reality. 'Between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act / Falls the Shadow,' he says. Listen to your stentorian teacher voice. I do feel like I'm shrinking the Shadow a bit.

Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?

Tears are not endless.

I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.

Who can explain why a few words in a particular tone can clear acres of sudden unfamiliarity? ...Would that person look up and grin, and find him grinning back, full of the sweet miraculous relief of having been perfectly received? ...He was saying, if it's not carrots, it's something else; he was saying, How futile life is, the slicing of carrots, the eating of meals; he was saying, How wonderful life is, to come home to the security of carrots in the kitchen; he was saying, Another day come to its devastating close. He was saying all this and I heard him because he was like me, entirely ambivalent about life. It was almost a question: Should I be full of joy or despair, Rosie? Joy, my face always replied to him, not because I felt sure that was the answer, but because I'd begun to want to make it his.

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I'd have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That's what I'd want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

I don't write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don't, everything feels even worse.

The initiate, a boy of no more than twelve, was wailing and a group of older boys were holding him down on a log while a few men cut into him, making hundreds of small slits on his back and shoulders. They dropped a citrus mixture into each wound so that the skin would puff up and the scars would be raised and textured to look like crocodile skin. His blood had soaked the log in dark striations. When they were done they painted him with oil and turmeric and smeared him with white clay and carried him off weeping and half conscious into seclusion until he healed. Fen and I walked down to the beach. I'd seen dozens

Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.

missionaries are now rushing in droves to the Solomons to convert their wicked souls.

1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes.

What's the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life.

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's.

I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

The story you think you know is never the real one.

Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides.

I has a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.

If I smiled at her she smiled back, and there were times I half pretended, half believed, she was my wife.

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart," she said finally.

And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there.

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

That night at Gertie's when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn't say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn't know the difference then.

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages?