Top 91 Lily King Quotes
#1. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
Lily King
#2. But you can't have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she's Southern but she's not on the Grid. She's a different type altogether. Trust me on that one.
Lily King
#3. I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.
Lily King
#4. missionaries are now rushing in droves to the Solomons to convert their wicked souls.
Lily King
#5. It all goes back to this idea of ownership again. Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us.
Lily King
#6. The story you think you know is never the real one.
Lily King
#7. There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.
Lily King
#8. I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. 'Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.' She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny. 'I love you,' she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.
Lily King
#9. That night at Gertie's when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn't say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn't know the difference then.
Lily King
#10. mind Nell was writing: - ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers - paint on face only
Lily King
#11. I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake.
Lily King
#12. I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.
Lily King
#13. I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
Lily King
#14. You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.
Lily King
#15. Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.
Lily King
#16. She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.
Lily King
#17. Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.
Lily King
#18. She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic.
Lily King
#19. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there.
Lily King
#20. Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?
Lily King
#21. We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.
Lily King
#22. She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women.
Lily King
#23. For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating
Lily King
#24. Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell.
Lily King
#25. Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible.
Lily King
#26. He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.
Lily King
#27. You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist.
Lily King
#28. I can't swim, so you better join me.
Lily King
#29. I've also done things that put me in odd situations.
Lily King
#30. For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain.
Lily King
#31. My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?
Lily King
#32. I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.
Lily King
#33. Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
Lily King
#34. Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.
Lily King
#35. I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.
Lily King
#36. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.
Lily King
#37. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?
Lily King
#38. Personality depends on context, just like culture. Certain people bring out certain traits in each other [...] You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.
Lily King
#39. Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart," she said finally.
Lily King
#40. Hello and goodbye are the same. Baya ban," she said. "As many times as you can stand it.
Lily King
#41. He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.
Lily King
#42. I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. 'I cannot make this bag fast enough,' she said. We all fell over laughing.
Lily King
#43. Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.
Lily King
#44. Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.
Lily King
#45. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.
Lily King
#46. If I smiled at her she smiled back, and there were times I half pretended, half believed, she was my wife.
Lily King
#47. I didn't want to miss the euphoria. I haven't, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.
Lily King
#48. I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile.
Lily King
#49. Don't you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can't be without power - it doesn't work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.
Lily King
#50. I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.
Lily King
#51. I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
Lily King
#52. I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.
Lily King
#53. I has a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.
Lily King
#54. You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. What
Lily King
#55. Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?
Lily King
#56. To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.
Lily King
#57. They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction.
Lily King
#58. It came to him that he didn't like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . .
Lily King
#59. Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared.
Lily King
#60. Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.
Lily King
#61. Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.
Lily King
#62. Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.
Lily King
#63. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
Lily King
#64. You don't struggle with these questions?"
"No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have."
"An American flaw.
Lily King
#65. I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers.
Lily King
#66. conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.
Lily King
#67. But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She
Lily King
#68. There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.
Lily King
#69. Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
Lily King
#71. I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.
Lily King
#72. What's the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life.
Lily King
#73. He didn't answer, but I wasn't bothered. I was flattered that we'd gotten to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology. We passed through a long swath of fireflies, thousands of them flashing all round us, and it felt like soaring through stars.
Lily King
#74. A year and a half up that little tributary somewhere?' Tillie said. 'Good God,
Lily King
#75. the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.
Lily King
#76. I felt in some ways we'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words...
Lily King
#77. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.
Lily King
#78. I wasn't sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.
Lily King
#79. But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time.
Lily King
#80. I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.
Lily King
#81. He didn't like her strong, nor did he like her weak.
Lily King
#82. I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.
Lily King
#83. The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's.
Lily King
#84. Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?
Lily King
#85. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.
Lily King
#86. You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!
Lily King
#87. I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed.
Lily King
#88. -Can we have one day when we don't have to talk about the meaning of life?
-I don't think we ever talk about anything else.
Lily King
#89. It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.
Lily King
#90. I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.
Lily King
#91. Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?
Lily King
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