Mona Simpson Quotes
Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.
Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.
Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.
In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.
I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.
The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.
We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.
So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after
Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.
Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.
These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.
But would I have chosen to be Paul? I'd miss Will too much, the feel of his shins.
