Nell Zink Quotes

You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.

So many men, so little parking.

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.

If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.

It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.

She was young the way an actual young person is young.

It's a digital e-cigarette." "What's digital about it?" "You hold it in your fingers, like this." "I'm serious. Is it part of the Internet of things? Do they know when you're smoking it?" "I don't think so. I think they just mean it works on electricity.

Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

the heartrending petty bourgeois piteousness of cucumber sandwiches passed around by accounting majors whose overly colorful bow ties had been expressly chosen to keep them from looking like waiters.

Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home.

As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything.

Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life - literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain.

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

They should build a monument," Cary said. "All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public.

(It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.)

then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand

Over milk and cookies after Karen's return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. "You're a cipher," she said. "A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays." "I want to get good grades and go to college." "And what are you going to do when you get there?" "How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it's like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don't know what they are. Like 'sociology.' What is it?

Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.

And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans

She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

When the past is hard to explain, it's best to concentrate on the future.

From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee.

There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgement.

What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there's never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think.

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant.

I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world? Lee

You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour.

I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.

Twee," the wallcreeper remarked. "Twee!

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate.

Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile.