The Confessions of Frannie Langton

A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.

She had the knowledge from her mother, old knowledge. So long as you carried it in your head they couldn't take it away, she used to say. Not like weapons, or food, or clothes.

No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.

I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of this world, but less. To take oneself out of it. On paper, everything can be hammered into shape, though the world is shapeless. The trouble with writers is they spend their lives trying to lie to themselves.

English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always has the seep of water in it.

But the mind is its own place, as Milton said, it can make a Hell of Heaven and a Heaven of Hell. How does it do that? By remembering, or forgetting. The only tricks a mind can play.

So. There are some things that cannot be brought into the light, Frances.’ ‘Then let it be done in the dark!’ I cried. ‘Only let it be done.

Oh, they're fond of telling you things you already know. I swear they'd fish a man out of an ocean just so as they could shout at him, 'Why sir, I do believe that you have been drowning!' It's nonsense, but they think it's true because they believe it.

there were two things I loved: all those books I read, and all the people who wrote them.

But the first thing to know about whoring is that it’s work. You do it same way you’d empty a chamber pot, head down, nose pinched. Many an English wife must get herself through the same activity in the same fashion.

What did Shakespeare know? Love must alter, or it can't survive.

Whenever I stand on the edge of a great height – a bridge, a balcony – I am swept by a sudden desire to leap. But melancholia is not the leap, it is the desire. The constant irrepressible agonising urge.

…some men see silence as a net to toss their own words into.

How true it is that ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation

I tried begging. I tried standing up to do it, at first, but soon learned it worked better the dirtier you looked, the lower you crouched, and the further you stretched out your hand. The coves weren't giving, you see, they were buying. What they paid for was humiliation. Yours, an indemnity against theirs.

...with all that talk of science, last night, I cannot think of anything worse than spending all that time trying to understand the mechanics of life but not the beauty of it.

No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’ I said,