The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe
"I read Doris Lessing in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated reading work by women or about women because it always added up the same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation, even as the female was trying to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man." -Eileen Myles
we liked the idea of powerful women, but we don't like powerful women themselves
Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize, even though nothing about our external lives necessarily suggests it?... How to be someone who has to win every argument with a man and also sometimes likes the idea of being overpowered.
I was afraid I was trading important things for the baby, trading my body itself
Hemingway if Hemingway had taken women's studies classes
He liked to map out his books on the walls, which struck me as a very male impulse, wanting your whole thought process made manifest, inflicting it on a room.
One night we spent three hours talking about John Berryman's Dream Songs
It's like sleeping with a sparrow.
it was like being suddenly tumbled by a wave: I am alone.
He was also the most beautiful man I knew, and I never became immune or even habituated to his looks.
When we see each other, it's always the last night on earth: there is too much wine, a frantic, addict-y ardor.
Whenever you represent anyone, you are misrepresenting them: you will never capture them exactly as they see themselves.
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