Best 14 quotes of Maureen Howard on MyQuotes

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

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.

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

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.

I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom of some cruelly bred plant; admiration for the world spread for the world to see on my gullible face-unlike my other face with the sour look of a starved peasant.

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.

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.

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

Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative.

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.

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

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

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.

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