Shouldn’t it have lasted longer—the mix of loneliness and lust and habit she always felt with Bob, the mix that was surely love, for it so often felt like love, how could it not be love, surely nature with its hurricanes and hail was counting on this to suffice?
Lorrie Moore, “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,” Birds of America, p. 28
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 203
Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggles for naught, drowned by time.
David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”
I thought of all the longing, the pain, the letters (sent and unsent), the crying jags, the telephone monologues, the suffering, the rationalizing, the analyzing which had gone into each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners. I knew the way I described them was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot.
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, p. 200
What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom almost nothing is known? ‘I famish/and I pine,’ she says in my handy desk translation. And so did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led?
So the search for the impossible man went on.
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, p. 109-110
Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be…
What I really wanted was to give birth to myself—the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world.
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, p. 51
You were, for me, that night, everything I always dreamt of in life.
Before Sunset (2004)
At some indefinite passage in night’s sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood’s branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night’s could touch her; nothing did.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 95
