Top 27 Francine Du Plessix Gray Quotes
#2. If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#3. Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#6. All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#7. I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#8. Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I've sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#9. I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#10. The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#11. As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#12. I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#14. The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#15. The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#16. Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#18. Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#19. I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#20. Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#21. One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#22. The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event ... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us ... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#23. One forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#25. How the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
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