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Quote by Lesley Glaister

“During the film (long, miserable) he takes her hand and squeezes rhythmically as if he's milking a cow.  She's distracted by wondering if he has ever, in fact, milked a cow.”

Quote by Lesley Glaister

Work

A Particular Man

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Author

Lesley Glaister

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“He watched me like he’d forgotten how to blink—eyes trailing every movement, hungry in a way that felt dangerous. Like he might devour me just for breathing wrong. And God help me, I wanted to breathe wrong.”

“To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid. Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge. Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD's in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year--people whose names you may or may not even know but you've watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they're not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year? It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to. Now that part, more than ever. It's mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88's until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don't and promising yourself you will next year. It's wearing frightful color combination in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who--like clockwork, year after year--denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one. Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.”

“Child, you keep demanding impossible promises from those who cannot even take care of themselves. But what joy have you ever derived from being so dependent and unassured, so needy, lost, and afraid? You keep saying you want to count on somebody— but I say stop counting. You keep telling me you crave security because the world frightens you. But the world, my love, is what you are.”

“The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)”