Topics Of Conversation Quotes

“To indicate interest is already to expose oneself to humiliation. To admit the existence of a desired object is to admit that to be rejected by the desired object, to admit that the desired object's disappearance, one of the two always inevitable, even if only in death, will be painful.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“To flirt was to expose one's desires, an act inherently shaming.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that's what narrative's for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it's harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you've grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn't do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The point is I'm always—my mind's always—there's a churning inside, you know?”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Am I, just now, more interested in appearing openly louche (look at me lapping at luxury) or secretly wounded? How close to the surface is my pain? Or, rather, how close to the surface do I want my pain to appear to be? How enamored am I of the clichés of female pain? Or, rather, of which of these clichés am I enamored? Do I wish to make my distress visible and, therefore, hysterical? Or do I wish to suffer in silence?”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times its barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I don't know what I was hoping for. Some kind of magic, obviously.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The problem wasn't thinking of myself as the protagonist of a narrative it was that I hadn't figured out the right narrative yet.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“This is female socialization, that is, the desire to be everywhere approved of, carried to its logical extreme.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Later I understood that his ugliness gave him power. Or anyway it made him mean, and if you're a white man, being mean, usually you get what you want.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“You, I said to my reflection in the mirror, are a real bitch.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“No one has a plan for you and your life doesn't have a soundtrack, it's just a series of . . . accidents and split-second decisions and coincidences and demographics, where you live and when you were born and who your parents were and how much money they had.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Truth didn't help. Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent. The trick was picking the right moments. The trick was knowing when to lie.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“But I had never had a self I was much interested in keeping . . .”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story's protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn't, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Look, you're all imagining yourselves . . . as people in some kind of story.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I do tend to think I'm the smartest person in every room and it doesn't help that lately I have been.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I know how this sounds; I mean, now I know how it sounds.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Why is it that people tell me things? I think it is because I like, liked, to drink and I am good at keeping my face quiet. Also because I ask questions.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“These details are hard to remember. Also I may be exaggerating them. Also I may be minimizing them. The difference between the two—for when a memory is retold, its particulars, inevitably, are brightened or muted depending on the arc of the story of which it is a part—a question of, determined by desire.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“This was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Pondering also how tired I was. Of the discrete—as in distinct, as in finite—pleasure I might take in making one last decision and then no more.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“For the record, I don't believe in meditation. I don't believe in crystals or cleanses or cosmic dusts.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The sitter is my age, a fact about which I feel some guilt. Or, she is the age I still usually imagine myself to be. In fact she is roughly a decade younger.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“A writer shoves into her first novel more or less everything she has ever thought, seen, read, loved, hated, experienced.”
― Miranda Popkey

“The best moments a person can have in their life are the ones that allow them to be themselves.”
― Steven Cuoco

“Leadership that knows how to galvanize, empower and maximize youth potential will remain relevant and on top.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“Wojnicz już zauważył, że każda dyskusja, czy szło o demokrację, czy o piąty wymiar, czy o rolę religii socjalizm, Europę, wreszcie sztukę nowoczesną, wszystko w końcu sprowadzało się do kobiet”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Empuzjon

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