Quotes from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“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.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“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.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“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.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

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“I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots.
The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic.
“Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself?
I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans.
“Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist.
“Well, c’mere,” he said softly.
My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door.
He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did.
“Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio.
“Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness.
“So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?”
I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me.
He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors.
Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened.
And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor.
“R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched.
“Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug.
“Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him.
It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.”
― Ree Drummond, quote from The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

“The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers — more's the pity.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the Womb, we emerge into solitude among our Fellows, and return again to solitude within the Grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But propinquity is never fusion. We exchange Words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. We marry and there are two solitudes in the house instead of one; we beget children, and there are many solitudes. We reiterate the act of love; but again propinquity is never fusion. The most intimate contact is only of Surfaces, and we couple, as I have seen the condemned Prisoners at Newgate coupling with their Trulls, between the bars of our cages. Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our lover or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power; and this we are for ever trying to do, despite the fact that by doing it we cause ourselves to feel more solitary than ever. The reality of Solitude is the same in all men, there being no mitigation of it, except in Forgetfulness, Stupidity or Illusion; but a man's sense of Solitude is proportionate to the sense and fact of his Power. In anz set of circumstances, the more Power we have, the more intensely do we feel our solitude. I have enjoyed much Power in my life.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

“Every service had a price. Every object a value. If someone made you a sword, you paid him the appropriate amount or traded something of equal value with him. If a man saved your life, you either paid him the amount you considered that life worth, or you saved his in return. Until either of those things was transacted, you were in his debt. It was business. And if Balthazar believed in anything with religious fervor, it was that.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, quote from Unholy Night

“This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration—when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

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