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Quote by Sarah Manguso

“I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn't that we'd been born angry; we'd become women and ended up angry.”

Quote by Sarah Manguso

Book:Liars

Work

Liars

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Author

Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is an American writer born in 1974. Her work is known for its concise and profound style, covering personal experiences, memory, and emotions. Manguso's works include poetry, novels, and essays, which often explore themes of time, death, and interpersonal relationships. more

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“Margarita scanned the crowd coming up the stairs and found the woman Korovyov was pointing to. She was a young woman of about twenty, with an unusually stunning figure, but with agitated and insistent eyes. "What handkerchief?" asked Margarita. "She has a chambermaid assigned to her," explained Korovyov, "and every night for thirty years the maid has laid out a handkerchief for her on her night table. The minute she wakes up she sees it there. She's tried burning it in the stove and drowning it in the river, but nothing helps. "What kind of handkerchief?" whispered Margarita, raising and lowering her hand. "A handkerchief with a dark-blue border. The fact is that when she was a waitress in a cafe, her boss lured her into the storeroom one day, and nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy, carried him into the woods, stuffed the handkerchief in his mouth, and then buried him in the ground. At her trial she said she had nothing to feed the child." "And where's the owner of the cafe?" asked Margarita. "Your Majesty," squeaked the cat suddenly from below." Allow me to ask you: what does the owner have to do with this? he wasn't the one who smothered the baby in the woods!”

“SONG OF ONE OF THE GIRLS Here in my heart I am Helen; I’m Aspasia and Hero, at least. I’m Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Staël; I’m Salomé, moon of the East. Here in my soul I am Sappho; Lady Hamilton am I, as well. In me Récamier vies with Kitty O’Shea, With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell. I’m of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.”

“Although the association between women and cats who are standoffish and wrapped up in themselves is a longstanding one, there are, as we saw in Chapter 3, plenty of women who feel a need to love and not simply to be loved. (Does Freud restrict women to loving either themselves or children as extensions of themselves, but not men?) In any case, Freud introduces here a curious facet of love, which would seem to apply not only to men, which is that we human beings are attracted to people (women and children, for example) and animals (cats, for example) that show little or no interest in us. Are we then interested in anything that seems narcissistically wrapped up in itself (its interest in itself pointing the way for our own interest or desire?) or are we interested in these things precisely because they seem inaccessible? Do we pursue them because they shun us and wound our own narcissism? Do we pursue them because they seem the most valuable – valuable precisely because they are so difficult to win – because we suspect that we will never win them? Or do we pursue them because we identify with something about them or want to be like them?”

“Are women complete human beings, with our own socialised and embodied experiences, our stories forever changing as we move through time? Or are we a cobbled together, pick-and-mix range of woman-y offerings, most of which fall into decay as we age? Is a woman really a woman when there’s nothing more for men to take from or project onto her? When she might, in fact, seem to be on the verge of living for herself?”

“Leak the air from their tires, call them in the middle of the night whispering sour nothings, let their dogs out of their yards... these men who hurt you, who wrong you, who hit you, make them miserable in every way you can. Some would call it spite, for women it will be called spite and being vindictive; while injured men receive their justice and pass out their vengeance, women will be called petty and catty, won't get to feel the honor a word like revenge endows upon men. You will. Inside you will declare it. You will declare victory when you hurt them back and move on from them faster than a machine hems a jean...”