Rufi Thorpe Quotes

My life was worth nothing except the books I read,

What had been so funny? But you can never remember what you were laughing about, and even if you could, it seems doubtful that it would still be funny.

What had happened was so big, and we were so used to considering our lives as trivial. We almost didn't know how to approach it. The largeness of what had happened, of what we had done.

It will be okay," Franklin said. And even though I felt he was far too optimistic, I also suspected that there was wisdom in his optimism; Franklin's scale for "okay" spanned thousands of years. He didn't worry about someone being unhappy for a few hours or days. He didn't really worry about unhappiness at all. I think he worried about animals and sunlight and possibly grain. He worried about the furtherance of human knowledge as a grand cooperative endeavor that made him coworkers with everyone from Proust to Einstein to the author of Inanna.

My mom said it's different when it's the woman who's violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it's natural for a guy to just 'lose his temper,' but if a woman does the same thing, then it's a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.

I'm just saying, when a woman in a maiden, she's in the spotlight. Everybody cares what a pretty, young girl does and says. And she's got some pretty strict archetypes to adhere to: Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Britney Spears. Pick your poison. But when you become a young mother? People don't give a fuck what you're doing. Their eyes glaze over before they even finish asking you. Once a woman starts doing the most important work of her life, all of a sudden, nobody wants to know a thing about it.

It was my otherness that so angered these boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn't understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrance couldn't understand me and it made him want to save me.

Some have characterized the boomers as optimistic, but to my view they were simply soft and rather unprepared. They didn't know how to cook or sew or balance their own checkbooks. They were bad at opening the mail. They got headaches while trying to lead Girl Scout meetings, and they sat down in folding chairs with their fingers pinching the bridges of their noses, trying not to cry over how boring and hard life had turned out to be, as around them feverish little girls screamed with laughter over the fact that one of them had stepped in poop..

She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.

How could it be that I wanted those scary narrow streets and books and coffee shops for her so much more than she wanted them for herself?

I was so confused by her. By her naïveté mixed up with her worldliness, by her beauty that was so unattended by vulnerability.

I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren't even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.

Sure, and fatherhood is super important too. I'm not trying to make this a women-only club by any means. Just that even men rarely view their role in child rearing as the most important thing they do, when in fact it is clearly the most important thing that anybody does.

What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both.

What I had always loved most about literature was the way it eased my own loneliness. Even

That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for.