Helen Argiro · 255 pages
Rating: (87 votes)
“No wonder there are so many people with eating disorders.It’s like this diet plan is being administered by the Gestapo.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“To a woman, being married means you do not under any circumstances put your penis in another woman’s vagina. It also means no blowjobs, no oral, no anal, no phone sex, no sex of any kind, ever, with anyone other than your wife for as long as you’re married. As soon as you say ‘I do’, it means that where other women are concern ‘I don’t’ is the only correct response. If you play by these rules, you’re safe. If you don’t, we leave. It’s really that simple.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“When a guy says he's a 'simple man', what he's really telling you is he's cheap.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“In the suburbs lust thrives and flourishes like an epidemic of lawn grubs during a heat wave.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“Having sex with your neighbour is not a good idea. Not under any circumstances, nothing good will come of it. It’s a cliché. It’s a soap opera. It’s a bad made for TV movie.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“It’s really hard to be turned on by a man who shows up for a date in corduroy pants and big white walking shoes that look as though he’s shoved his feet inside of two giant pillows.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“And so it was on the second Thursday of September, these five men kissed their spouses and children good-bye and climbed aboard the rented RV for a fun filled weekend of golfing, drinking, taking drugs and having sex with women who were not their wives.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
“When a guy says he’s ‘a simple man’ what he’s really telling you is he’s cheap," Madeline said.”
― Helen Argiro, quote from Tales of Sex & Suburban Lunacy
Helen Argiro
Born place: Toronto, Canada
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“We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self
because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a
great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away,
of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate
something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
“In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless
“I would think you an utter fool if you did not doubt me, warrior. Instead, I am forced to respect your uncommon intelligence. Now what, do you suppose, should I do from there?”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Elijah
“(Миналото беше на сигурно място в клетката. Защо да не погледне?)”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Laughter in the Dark
“But I know that in order to get to the end of a thing, one must start at the beginning.”
― Michelle Zink, quote from Guardian of the Gate
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