Tobsha Learner Quotes

Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

To be desired by those who are themselves highly desirable is in itself an aphrodisiac.

I had made the fatal mistake of believing in his touch, as if the intelligence of his hands, our orgasms, the way he penetrated me, had affected him as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this is the catch cry of the egoist: I love, therefore I must be loved. Perhaps it is the Achilles' heel of my gender.

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.

Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue

I am reminded of the belief of the ancient Sephardic doctor Isrealicus: that food must really be delicious if both disposition and body are to benefit.

The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival.

Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship
you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

There is a schism in me, between the erotic and the intimate. One, by definition, negates the other. For me the pursuit of sensuality for its own sake without the confines of emotional expectation or history is a freeing of the libido, standing outside of marriage, conception, emotional obligation. The subject becomes object. Object is the ascetic, the visual moment, no past, no future, just the moment of orgasm. This is not exclusively male territory. The encounter is, by its very nature, transitory.

I think the nature of faith is love an love of the goodness in man.

Venus, the first star, has appeared, another child is born and the stream runs on. Water must be a celestial element for it has neither time nor history stamped upon it and is as constant as the tides of the sea or the rising of the Moon. I long for such constancy, be it in life or in comradeship. Memory is a great deceiver; it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure. I have a noble spirit but I want to live. Tell me how to live and who to live for. I fear I shall surrender too much in love and then survive to regret it.

You must appreciate that love is the last reason for which a man marries.

This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

Death strips all men of dignity.

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

Be bad, and if you can't be bad be worse.

So many of man's actions appear to have no immediate consequence but, concealed, do their work until finally all catches up and forms a complex web of cause and effect.

Trust is won not given.

I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.