Showing posts with label Picador. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Picador. Show all posts

 

"It isn't the fault of France if we're still a couple of foreigners, dear friend. It's our fault. It's a vocation, a destiny. Like our profession as interpreters, another way of always being a foreigner, of being present without being present, of existing but not existing."

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The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

"To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylized gestures...Indeed, a woman who is not narcissistic is considered unfeminine. And a woman who spends literally most of her time caring for, and making purchases to flatter, her physical appearance is not regarded in this society as what she is: a kind of moral idiot."

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On Women by Susan Sontag

 

"It was quarter past three; she reworked a few sentences. Twenty past three; deleted an adjective, missed it and put it back. Read through the text; it was a bit too long. Three twenty-five; deleted an entire paragraph at the beginning and got the text to the right word count, but now it lacked structure and direction. Well, in that sense, it mirrored life itself."

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Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson

"Our parents' lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers' and fathers' power to shape and interpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them."

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The Afterlife by Donald Antrim

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