Sex and Rage

“The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.”

“People go through life eating lamb chops and breaking their mother’s hearts.”

“It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.”

“Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”

“She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.”

“Max's laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare--he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn't grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die--when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.”

“For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.”

“They must have begun in life knowing they were going to amount to something.”

“She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?”

“It made her question why human beings always appeared to be coming along so nicely as a whole when the bottom would fall out once again and they began collecting ears and filings from each other's heads.”

“He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.”

“With great effort, she dragged her attention away from the book,”

“It seemed to her that she’d been smoking in order to get through the days, not that her days were ornamented by cigarettes.”

“it seemed much more likely to scald and burn from sex and rage instead.”

“writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.”

“She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn’t publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.”

“She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring.”

“It was all gone. She knew she’d never be able to see Dobson & Dalloway for the first time, she’d never get scared of Wally Moss and hide in the ladies’ room putting on lip gloss, she’d never be able to not go someplace because Max was there . . . And she’d never ever see New York in this euphoric condition. And she and Wini would probably never have dinner on Fifty-second Street in that Japanese restaurant for as long as they lived. The first time was all gone.”

“Oh, come on,” he said finally, a secret pleased look just beneath the surface of his face, “you love it here. Admit it.”

“when he smiled, of course, he looked so young . . . No wonder she was getting this under-the-eyelashes treatment, she decided; the bastard was probably a Scorpio, trying to take her prisoner. She gave him the rest of her coffee.”

“Sunrise swept out to sea, a sea of her own tears. “Hey,” Jacaranda said, acting as though it were “only a movie,” a sound in her voice of carefree girlish abandon,”

“you don’t know what life is. One day you’re going to run into a brick wall.”

“The word “escape” had blown out the glow: it was so boring of these American women to imagine they were worth pursuing.”

“And besides, when a story ended, audiences wanted a fixed place—a forever—seduced and abandoned or happily ever after, not off into the night juggling oranges,”

“But Jacaranda had always been lucky.”

“Those women, her age and a little older, who’d all gone crazy or who were hooking in the Polo Lounge or who were married to real old movie stars and had to look old too, to match. Those occasional men of genius who, like one friend of hers, could cast the right person for the right part and never miss—never.”

“A woman who was about Jacaranda’s age approached them. She was what Jacaranda thought of as “one of those Vassar graduates who can spell from birth.”

“Honey, don't ever try to figure out what's going on between two people.”

“howling on the tile bathroom floor. Sunrise bleeding in her white dress waited just behind Jacaranda’s next drink. Her next drink would always be waiting for her, languishing away.”

“I’ve been in fast company, as they call it,”