Marilyn French
THE WOMEN'S ROOM: QUOTES

The stone in my stomach is like an oyster's pearl - it is the accumulation of defense against an irritation. My pearl is my hatred: my hatred is learned from experience: that is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then, parhaps, I could unlearn it.

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.

The true mysteries of the true church, if there ever were one, would be those: Why do we love and hate? How in hell do we manage to live together? I don't know. I already told you, I live alone.

Some things cannot be categorized, judged, they can only be lived by those who are willing to live them out, or, parhaps, those who have to live them out. And such people do not worry about the consequences. [..] I have been thinking for a long time now that extraordinary circumstances place one outside the human race, outside usual human concepts, and that the rest of us cannot judge people who find themselves in such a condition. But even as I write it, a cold nervous germ attacts my spine, creeps up, all the way to my brain, and suggests that all life is like that, all lives.

I don't think in terms of forever because forever is not something I can hope for. That I love you - you can't doubt that, can you?

The love that fills all need, assuages all hurt, excites and stimulates when boredom falls, and is absolute, I mean absolute, that never fails no matter what you do or don't do, what you are or fail to be. I think we all spend our lives searching for that, and obviously we never find it. Even if we do find it - like some people's mothers love them that way, you know? - it's not enough, it doesn't fulfil, it is too smothering, or too submissively accepting, not exciting enough. So we go on searching, feeling discontent, sensing that the world or what it promised us has failed us, or even worse, [..] that we have failed it. And some of us learn, late, I'm afraid, that that [kind of love] isn't possible. And we give up the hope. Once that happens, we are in a different place from other people; we can't communicate it easily, but we have different standards. We are more easily contented, more easily pleased. Love, rare thing, when it happens, is a wonderful gift, a toy, a miracle, but we don't count on it to protect us from future days when it rains and the typewriter breaks and it's just as well because the words won't come anyway, and the article has to be written by Monday and mailed, or there won't be enough money for next month's rent - you know. Love is a golden rain that comes down when it will, and as it spatters in your open palm you exclain over its brightness, its wonderful moistening of your dry life, its glitter, its warmth. But that's all. You can't hold on to it. It can't fill all of you.