It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.

Zoë Heller

Categorized in : Doe Reflection Nice

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality. by Zoë Heller

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

distance dream reality

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

atheist imagination mind

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

thinness existence possession

We are bound by the secrets we share. by Zoë Heller

We are bound by the secrets we share.

bounds secret share

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

party writing book

It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it.

cuddling want way

It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

greatness keys thinking

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

crush events children

...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact... by Zoë Heller

...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left.

pact romance ends

Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won or lost. That fight is lost one of two ways. Some simply lose their balance and fall, others are pushed.

lost-ones fighting fall

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

parent class people

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how di... by Zoë Heller

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

institute adultery committed

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

departure honesty people

When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse.

gypsy rose trying