Gitana Adelle Quotes

Of course, these women ought to have listened when he told them he wasn't looking for anything serious. But on a certain level, it didn't really matter if it was stupid of them. Ethical people don't take advantage of other people's weakness; that's like being a slumlord or a price gouger. And treading on weakness is exactly what dating felt like, with so many of these women
with their wide-open hopefulness, their hunger for connection and blithe assumption that men wanted it just as badly. ~ Adelle Waldman

She said some people were horizontally oriented, while others were vertical. Horizontally oriented people were concerned exclusively with what others think, with fitting in or impressing their peers. Vertically oriented people were obsessed only with some higher "truth," which they believed in wholeheartedly and wanted to trumpet no matter who was interested. People who are horizontally oriented are phonies and sycophants, while those who are entirely vertically oriented lack all social skill - they're the ones on the street shouting about the apocalypse. Normal people are in the middle, but veer one way or the other. ~ Adelle Waldman

In a certain sense, it's harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody's feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he's just said she's fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk. ~ Adelle Waldman

His intelligence was just something he'd been born with. Luck of the draw, like being beautiful. It was a rationalization to say that he'd worked hard. It was like being given a fine knife and taking the trouble to polish and sharpen it: it's great that you make the effort, but someone had to give you the knife. ~ Adelle Waldman

Men and women on relationships are like men and women on orgasms, except in reverse," Jason continued boisterously. "Women crave relationships the way men crave orgasm. Their whole being bends to its imperative. Men, in contrast, want relationships the way women want orgasm: sometimes, under the right circumstances. ~ Adelle Waldman

Many of those late nights, when he'd paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he'd painstakingly created and could finally inhabit - moving within it from character to character, feverishly distilling into words thoughts not his own but theirs - had been ecstasies of absorption and self-forgetfulness. ~ Adelle Waldman

Good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control. ~ Adelle Waldman

A woman who knows what she wants, Adelle always told me, is likely to receive it. ~ Alice Hoffman

What is it when your former life becomes your dreams? The things you took for granted are now in that mystical realm where you can only see them with your eyes closed, ephemeral and distant. ~ Nicole Adelle Flamer

The belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy. ~ Adelle Waldman

Each time Nate saw her, Elisa's beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they'd broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he'd accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact - pretty girl - she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children's toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips. ~ Adelle Waldman

To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party. ~ Adelle Davis

Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship, and it's all about hiding your disappointment. And then, once you're married, it's about hiding your sins. ~ Joss Whedon

If this country [America] is to survive, the best-fed-nation myth had better be recognized for what it is: propaganda designed to produce wealth not health. ~ Adelle Davis

I'm sure a lot of it is my fault," he said. He smiled ruefully. "And by a lot, I mean all."
"Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine," Hannah said. " 'What a lovable fuck-up I am.' The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn't get me anything. ~ Adelle Waldman

This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo.

Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there?

And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working.

("Before I Wake...") ~ Henry Kuttner

Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease. Almost no one has studied health. ~ Adelle Davis

When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed. ~ Adelle Waldman

Nutrition ... has been kicked around like a puppy that cannot take care of itself. Food faddists and crackpots have kicked it pretty cruelly ... ~ Adelle Davis

He thought women were every bit as intelligent as men, every bit as capable of figuring out how long it would take for train A to crash into train B if the two were moving toward each other at an average speed of C. They were as capable of rational thought; they just didn't appear to be as interested in it. They were happy to apply rational argument to defend what they already believed but unlikely to be swayed by it, not if it conflicted with inclination or, worse, intuition, not if it undercut a cherished opinion or nettled their self-esteem. So many times, when Nate had been arguing with a woman, a point was reached when it became clear that no argument would alter her thinking. Her position was one she "felt" to be true; it was, as a result, impermeable. ~ Adelle Waldman

As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted over him. He felt almost unbearably lonely. He wondered if he was flawed on some deep level, whether – in spite of all the friends who seemed to think he was a good guy (and he was a pretty good friend), in spite of being a fairly decent son – there was something terribly wrong with him. Did romance reveal some truth, fundamental lack, a coldness, that made him shrink back at just the moment when reciprocity was called for? ~ Adelle Waldman

Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick. ~ Adelle Waldman

Trey Gate's maternal grandmother, Adelle Maxwell, was also an important influence on him, encouraging him to read as much as possible, pushing him to excel in all that he did, challenging him to use his mind. They played card games together frequently, especially games like Concentration that required mental agility. ~ James Wallace

At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential. ~ Adelle Waldman

As I see it every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself. ~ Adelle Davis

Aurit argued that for the person with more power in a relationship to refuse to take seriously the unhappiness of the other, simply because nothing is forcing them to, is the ultimate dick move: "It's like if the United States in the 1950s said, 'Sorry, black people in the South, but if you don't like the way you're being treated, you can go back to Africa. ~ Adelle Waldman

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. ~ Adelle Waldman

We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are. ~ Adelle Davis