Quotes from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“We are all children until our fathers die.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will require all of your energy.

It's you who has to hold on to earth. You have to tighten your grip -- which means letting go of him.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You sense that he's dangerous but don't now why - and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt. ”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I hate weddings,' she says. 'They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You don't see him again. Sometimes you worry that he loved you better than any man ever has or will--even if it had nothing to do with you. Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into a cab, every runner along the river, every motorcycle coming and going.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, 'Just be yourself,' as though I had any idea who that might be.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“In the cab to the station, he told me that when he was growing up he'd see a look of pleasure cross his mother's face and ask what she was thinking: she'd say, I was just thinking of your father. "That's how I want us to be," Archie said.
I smiled.
"What?"
I said, "I was just thinking of your father.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“I said, "It's not like that." I wanted to convince her. I said "We think alike."

Oh, my dear," she said. "A man thinks with his dick.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look.
Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years.
The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it. ”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You act like I just want to sleep with you...
I want to EVERYTHING with you.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself.

You imagine him being attracted to them.

You're drinking gasoline to stay warm.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He gazed at me. "You've grown up honey." It felt good to hear it. I thought maybe he was right. Then it occurred to me that if I really had grown up I wouldn't want to be told.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. "We are all children until our fathers die.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“But then you hear that he can't hear you, you see that he can't see you. You are not here--and you haven't even died yet. You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol on the ladies' room door.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“You realize that if he doesn't know who you are, he won't be able to remember who you were.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.
I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window.
Nobody was watching, except me.”
― Melissa Bank, quote from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

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Popular quotes

“Now there are two kinds of hardening, one of the understanding, the other of the sense of shame, when a man is resolved not to assent to what is manifest nor to desist from contradictions. Most of us are afraid of mortification of the body, and would contrive all means to avoid such a thing, but we care not about the soul's mortification. And indeed with regard to the soul, if a man be in such a state as not to apprehend anything, or understand at all, we think that he is in a bad condition; but if the sense of shame and modesty are deadened, this we call even power (or strength).”
― Epictetus, quote from The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

“And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain and I pressed on.”
― Vikram Chandra, quote from Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Holy the Firm

“You cannot repay evil with evil.”
― Susan Campbell Bartoletti, quote from The Boy Who Dared

“The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought… The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others… It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves… When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary”
― Will Durant, quote from The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

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