Fierce Attachments

A person’s life was made rich or poor, worth a ransom or something to throw away in the gutter, if it was enhanced by or stripped of feeling.

The surprise kept us coming back for more

It seemed to me in later years the deep nerveless passivity of that time together had become the design burned into my skin while the cloth of my own experience melted away.

You go on picking up these marginal types, idealising them, and then you can’t believe it when they don’t know their place. You’re amazed that they’re doing this to you. Don’t they know you’re supposed to leave them, not they leave you? And then you get on your high horse.’

each of us identified a collection of undesirable character traits in the others from which she separated herself, as though dissociation equalled deliverance.

Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

y mother said I needed love to experience life at a high level, but in fact mourning lost love was the highest level of life she had attained.

Knowing how to give as little as possible to get as much as possible was something I should have taken in with mother’s milk.

the rage over an absence of power

She knew of no other way to make herself feel better than to make people want her