Maureen Howard Quotes

#1. If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.

Maureen Howard

#2. From above, start with the privileged view.

Maureen Howard

#3. I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have.

Maureen Howard

#4. None of the adults I knew ever touched in public, much less kneaded each others flesh.

Maureen Howard

#5. Wouldn't a laugh serve us better than to battle it out with our mortal souls?

Maureen Howard

#6. To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois.

Maureen Howard

#7. There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed.

Maureen Howard

#8. I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

Maureen Howard

#9. Acceptance is the word we must substitute for dependence in dealing with the aged. Their acceptance of help, ours of their need.

Maureen Howard

#10. To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love.

Maureen Howard

#11. When I go home my mother and I play a cannibal game; we eat each other over the years, tender morsel by morsel until there is nothing left but dry bone and wig. She is winning-needless to say she has had so much more experience.

Maureen Howard

#12. It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.

Maureen Howard

#13. The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.

Maureen Howard

#14. Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

Maureen Howard

#15. The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

Maureen Howard

#16. Even when I was a grown woman, he [Father] would leave me on the edge of hysteria in all our arguments: though I married and lived as far as I could spiritually from Bridgeport, he reduced me in a matter of hours to a wriggling child, pleading to go free.

Maureen Howard

#17. The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.

Maureen Howard