Fay Weldon · 256 pages
Rating: (3.6K votes)
“I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.”
“even as she says it, sees love drain out of his eyes: and somehow, as a stream, which seeks its own level, it flows over into hers, and her fate is sealed. The less he loves, the more she will.”
“for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty.”
“Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.”
“We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening.”
“want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.”
“Its extremely potent active ingredient is an opioid called oxycodone, synthesized from the raw material of opium. The substance was a hot topic among doctors in the Weimar Republic because many physicians quietly took the narcotic themselves. In specialist circles Eukodal was the queen of remedies: a wonder drug. Almost twice as pain-relieving as morphine, which it replaced in popularity, this archetypal designer opioid was characterized by its potential to create very swiftly a euphoric state significantly higher than that of heroin, its pharmacological cousin. Used properly, Eukodal did not make the patient tired or knock him out—quite the contrary.”
“Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice”
“No. You surpass us all." Beside me she looked colorless and frail. "You are like a living rose among wax flowers. We may last forever, but you bloom brighter and smell sweeter, and draw blood with your thorns.”
“Life is not about having things. It’s about having good experiences.”
“Shortly after we met, my mother died. That day at her funeral, he stood beside me, I knew he was my angel. "Why are you crying?" I said, watching him wipe his eyes. "Why you are not crying?" he said. "Your mother is dead. You are daughter with no mother. I love you. Of course I cry.”
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