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Favorite Trivia – RELATIONSHIPS
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| “Asset: Woman’s chief asset is man’s imagination.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
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“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive.” David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
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“I don’t blame my Mom for anything, but I thank her for everything.” Patty Martino Alspaugh |
| “The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, hear much; always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends; never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as we possibly can; to hearken to what is said, and to answer to the purpose.”
Benjamin Franklin |
| bachelor: A guy who is foot-loose and fiancée free. – Playboy
Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
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A man sent a telegram to an undertaker advising him that his mother-in-law had died and asked whether she should be embalmed, cremated or just buried. He received this reply: “All three, take no chances.”
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| “To quote my mother (which she always loves), ‘I don’t care if you go to the grocery store today, or the post office, or the library. Get to know the people who are serving you.'”
Carla Hall – The Books That Changed My Life (ed. by Bethanne Patrick) |
| “How furious father [Amyntor] was with me [Phoenix], over his mistress with her dark, glistening hair. How he would dote on her and spurn his wedded wife, my own mother! And time and again she begged me, hugging my knees, to bed my father’s mistress down and kill the young girl’s taste for an old man.”
Homer – The Illiad (trans. by Fagles) |
| “I shall never think that you are late in arriving, provided you arrive safely.” [Ad Familiares., XVI, 12.]
Cicero |
| “There’s only one good reason to wait until 40 to have your babies. With any luck, you’ll be dead before they’re teen-agers.”
Los Angeles Times Columnist Randy Fitzgerald’s wife |
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“The amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous—I really only have Perfect Fun with myself. Other people won’t stop and look at the things I want to look at or, if they do, they stop to please me or to humour me or to keep the peace. But I am so made that as sure as I am with anyone, I begin to give consideration to their opinions and their desires, and they are not worth half the consideration that mine are. It’s enormously valuable and marvellous when I’m alone, the detail of life, the life of life.” Katherine Mansfield’s Journal (Christopher Morley’s Book of Days for 1931 [May 19]) |
| “I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.”
Rita Rudner (That’s Really Funny) |
| “I reflected sadly today how I tended to squabble with my women-friends. Here have I dropped out of all or nearly all my feminine friendships… I think it is a certain bluntness, frankness, coarseness, which does not offend men, but which aggravates women. The thing which has tended to terminate my women-friendships is that at a certain juncture they begin to disapprove and to criticize my course, and to feel a responsibility to say disagreeable things. One ought to take it smilingly and courteously; and one would, if one liked the sex—but I don’t like the sex. Their mental processes are obscure to me; I don’t like their superficial ways, their mixture of emotion with reason. One’s men-friends never criticize, they take one for better and worse. One gets plenty of criticism from foes, and one supplies the harshest condemnation oneself. My own feeling is that one’s duty to a friend is to encourage and uplift and compliment and believe in him. Women, I think, when they get interested in one, have a deadly desire to improve one. They think that the privilege of friendship is to criticize; they want deference, they don’t want frankness.” [January 31, 1907]
Arthur Christopher Benson – The Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson |
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“You can’t go wrong by treating people right.” Dean Jacobs, owner Dean’s Cake House |
| Man has his will, but woman her way.
Holmes |
| “I’ve had enough. A thousand torments tell against me. My chest is aching from embraces, my heels from clicking, eyeballs from grimaces, ears from shrieks, and most of all, my head from nonstop mindless chatter.” (Chatsky to Famulsov)
Alexander Griboedov – Woe From Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts (trans. Betsy Hulick) |
| “Getting rid of a man without hurting his masculinity is a problem. ‘Get out and I never want to see you again.’ might sound like a challenge. If you want to get rid of a man, I suggest saying, ‘I love you . . . I want to marry you . . . I want to have your children.’ Sometimes they leave skid marks.”
Rita Rudner (That’s Really Funny) |
| “Will Power: A man with will power is no match for a woman with wile power.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
| “The way I see it, you’ve got friends, then you got your best friend. Big Difference. To me, a friend is a guy who will help you move. A best friend is a guy who will help you move a body.”
Dave Attell (That’s Really Funny) |
| “Her maids were old, and if she took a new one You might be sure she was a perfect fright; She did this during her husband’s life— I recommend as much to every wife…”
Lord Byron – Don Juan |
| “There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been a mistake. She has lost her crown.”
George Eliot |
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“It is the duty of each man to bear his own discomforts, rather than diminish the comforts of his neighbor.” [De Officiis., III, 6.] Cicero |
| “Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes. I am telling you the plain truth. Yet when victims make their escape from this wild beat of Slavery, northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into this den . . . they are not only willing, but proud, to give their daughters in marriage to slaveholders. The poor girls have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and of the flowering vines that all the year round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they destined! The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness.”
Linda Brent – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl |
| “Meeting your date’s friends for the first time is like playing poker; you have to read each one of them, and then put forth just the right amount of conversation. If you go all in on someone who just wanted to say hi, you’ll risk seeming pushy and desperate. If you fold and stand there silent when you’re introduced to her chatty best friend, you might come off as weird and antisocial. And if you put a face that says ‘Don’t come near me,’ everyone else will fold.”
Justin Halpern – I Suck at Girls |
| “Have you had a kindness shown? Pass it on; ‘Twas not given for thee alone, Pass it on; Let it travel down the years, Let it wipe another’s tears…”
Rev. Henry Burton – Pass It On |
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“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.” David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| “After my show in Austin I met Kathie and Forrest in the lobby of the DRISKILL HOTEL . . . there he was MY SON FORREST cutting through everyone to get to me and I knew and know his motivations and intention was all pure because there is no language yet and therefore at least no linguistic manipulation. Kathie could not TELL him to do it. So for me there was all that trust of the non-verbal. That little guy cutting his way through all those others to get to me like the smell of DNA like a sweet little bird flying into a nest and nest is exactly what he did. He curled up in my arms almost in a fetal position and just HUNCHED in and I patted his back and just felt amazed and overwhelmed by his love. It almost outdid the love the audience gave me. Or rather, it was a nice balance.” [April 1994]
The Journals of Spalding Gray |
| “RELATIONSHIPS: Because sometimes destroying your life is a two-person job.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “Nursing an infant creates so much lost, empty time. Of the baby’s nighttime feeds I remember nothing. Of his daytime feeds I remember almost nothing . . .
“Day and night consisted of the input and output of milk . . . “I had no thoughts, no self-awareness, just an ability to sit with a little creature, who screamed and screamed.” Sarah Manguso – Ongoingness: The End of a Diary |
| “There’s this huge variety of Barbie dolls. They have Fun Time Barbie, Aviation Barbie. Oh, get this one: Gift-Giving Ken. You know, I really don’t think this is going to prepare my niece for adult relationships. How about Date-Breaking Ken, I-Still-Live-with-My-Mother Ken…”
Cathy Ladman (That’s Really Funny) |
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“I know what men want. I just don’t think they deserve it.” The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “I was angry with the kind of anger that had nothing to do with rationality. A lot of the time, I was mad at Gloria Steinem for having raised women’s expectations when I was just a toddler—but at least she lived by her principles, marrying late and never trying to raise kids; so then I got mad at Betty Friedan for having started it all with The Feminine Mystique, and when that wasn’t satisfying enough, I got mad at all the women in my feminist criticism class in graduate school, the ones who’d sat there and so smugly claimed it was impossible for a strong-willed women to ever have an equal partnership with a man. Because it was starting to look as if they’d been right.”
Hope Edelman – “The Myth of Co-Parenting” (The Bitch in the House – Cathi Hanauer, ed.) |
| “Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.”
Wilde |
| “Were kisses all the joy in bed, one woman would another wed.”
Shakespeare |
| “A baby will make love stronger, Days shorter, Nights longer, Your bankroll smaller, home happier, Your clothes shabbier, the past forgotten, and the future worth living for.”
Kevin P. McDonald – Cheers: 1,024 Toasts & Sentiments for Every Occasion |
| “Shopping lists, laundry loads, piles everywhere, nothing finished. How can I enjoy your sweet babble, when it takes eight full hours a day to ‘service’ you, sixteen to ‘guard’ you? Bottle feeding, diaper changing, vitamins, playing; diaper changing, solid food, dressing; a walk outside, diaper changing. Playing. Food. A bath. More feeding. Getting you to nap, getting you to sleep. Your laundry.” [May 15, 1978]
Phyllis Chester – With Child: A Diary of Motherhood |
| “To bear a child. to bare oneself to that experience. to touch a being with love that hasn’t done a damn thing to earn your love. To learn how to love. To care for when it can’t take care of you when you’re sick. To step out of yourself & learn to step back into yourself. This is the second step, the one we, as women, are just learning. To love without giving oneself away. to stand up without being sat back down.”
Alta (Mother to Daughter Daughter to Mother, ed. by Tillie Olsen) |
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“Why, when I was told the news, Dorothy Keeley Aldis – Maternity |
| “There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good; anger is best conquered by kindness. Such a victory over feeling may not indeed affect those who have wronged us, but it is a valuable piece of self-discipline. It is vulgar to be angry on one’s own account; we ought only to be angry for great causes.”
Amiel’s Journal |
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AIR TALK It’s sad that the air is the only It’s also nice that we share the air. Yoko Ono (Lisson Gallery brochure ’67) |
| “Both of us can’t be right, so you must be wrong.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “Let me get this straight: I give birth, raise kids, work AND cook, and I’m the weaker sex?”
The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “Quarrels would never last long, if there were not Faults on both Sides.” [CCCCXCIX]
The Moral Maxims And Reflections of the Duke De La Rochefoucauld |
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“‘Lonesome!’ the low voice cried in his guts. ‘No one to receive from you or give to you. No one warm enough and dear enough.'” [Doc] John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “Your children should always be your inspiration, even if it is just to drink more.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “No one prepared me for what it would mean to have a baby in the house. I remember the first day we brought L. home. Was it possible that I would ever sleep again? Truth be told, I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to perch beside my child’s bassinet like an owl on a limb of a tree to make sure he was still breathing. I loved to study the perfect shape of his head. The way he crinkled up his fingers, shorter than the end of a Q-tip; the size and shape of every yawn . . . instead of my husband rubbing up against my body at night, I awoke now to my son’s hands gripping a clump of my hair or digging into a roll of my flesh. My body served only one purpose. It had become a vessel from which to sustain this child.”
Jill Bialosky – “How We Became Strangers” (The Bitch in the House – Cathi Hanauer, ed.) |
| “At times I feel quite anxious in looking forward to another confinement, but Willie needs a companion and I ought to be willing to give him one. Yet at times the thought will come over me that I may bring into the world a deformed child. And if I should? May not mercy mingle with this judgment? May not such a trial be the very thing I need to teach me humility and patience? God knoweth.” [January 20, 1849]
Caroline Healey Dall – Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman |
| “I’m an aim-well, shoot-sharp, sharp-tongued, sharp-thinking, fast-speaking, foot-loose, loose-tongued, let-loose, woman-on-the-loose loose woman. Beware, honey.”
Sandra Cisneros – From Loose Woman |
| “Dear Mayreder! It was the fourth time that M. had called on us in the last few days, and we’re heartily glad to be rid of him . . . Klimt gave me the idea of shaping my bread into a heart. I did so, then he formed a toothpick into an arrow and plunged it into the heart. He took red wine and made it flow from the wound. It looked really good. He gave it to Mayreder as ‘my wounded heart.’ On reflection, I can see that it was a very brutal joke and I regret it . . . Incidentally, Klimt knows that M. is fond of me. He noticed and said as much as well. I didn’t deny it.” [April 17, 1898]
Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries 1898-1902 |
| “She was soft and pretty and her naked body was dissimilar to my wife’s and her breath smelt of melon. But we were on the sofa my wife bought, drinking wine from glasses my wife was given, beneath the painting my wife painted, in the flat where my wife died.”
Max Porter – Grief Is the Thing with Feathers |
| “Every morning bathing myself and shaving myself, And dressing myself. But no one in my life to take delight In my fastidious appearance. Every day walking, and deep breathing For the sake of my health. But to what use vitality? Every day improving my mind With meditation and reading, But no one with whom to exchange wisdoms…”
Edgar Lee Masters – Spoon River: Chandler Nicholas |
| “He [the writer’s husband] is not coming around. My sister may be right. I picture this baby in everything I do. When I get into the car I think, In four months I’ll be getting into the car with a baby; when I eat dinner I think, A baby will be here, throwing carrots; when I go to sleep I think, A baby will be breathing in the room down the hall, and we’ll hear it on the monitor; I cannot escape the baby. He, on the other hand, the one who wanted the baby more than I, seems to have his eyes sewn shut. I price cribs, consider car seats, study the vast assortment of nipples in the drugstores—slow flow, medium, one hole, two hole—and meanwhile he has his eyes sewn shut. He brings home exotic plants and tends them for hours, red saguaro opening in our home. An Arunda donax grows six feet tall in the hall. The bigger my belly, the more intense his hobbies. Plants. Electricity. Sci-fi stories that he reads for hours, I pick them up. Here is a whole new world. Here, comets of diamond fling themselves through the sky. Hello, I call to him. Hello. Sometimes he looks scared. He does not answer.” [February 20, 1999]
Lauren Slater – Love Works Like This: Travels Through a Pregnant Year |
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“One who expects his friend not to be offended by his own warts will pardon the other’s pimples. It is but fair that one who craves indulgence for failings should grant it in return.” [Satire, I, III] Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
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“Eve came to dinner with me [Lloyd Ziff] and my mother. Afterward she said to me, ‘Anyone who has to deal with a mother like that cannot be my boyfriend.’ And we were done! We stayed friends, though.'” Lili Anolik – Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. |
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“A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, ‘Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person.’ He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.”
Weather – Jenny Offill |
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“Met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week; will probably never see him again (he works for J. Arthur Rank in London), but wrote my best poem about him afterwards—the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with—such is life. [The man was Ted Hughes.]” [March 3, 1956] “The most shattering thing is that in the last two months I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt. I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking, healthy Adam, half French, half Irish [and a good deal of Yorkshire farming stock, too], with a voice like the thunder of God—a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer . . .” [April 17, 1956] “I shall tell you now about something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying and wish you to think on it and share some of it. It is this man, this poet, this Ted Hughes. I have never known anything like it. For the first time in my life I can use all my knowing and laughing and force and writing to the hilt all the time, everything, and you should see him, hear him! . . . I have never been so exultant, the joy of using all my wit and womanly wisdom is a joy beyond words. What a huge humor we have, what running strength.” [April 19, 1956] “I cannot stop writing poems! They come better and better. They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth that Ted is teaching me.” [April 21, 1956] “For the first time in my life, mother, I am at peace . . . Never before, even with Richard, did I cease to have little opportunist law courts in session in my head, whispering, look at this flaw, that weakness; how about a new man, a better man? . . . I feel that all my life, all my pain and work has been for this one thing. All the blood spilt, the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving . . . I see the power and voice in him [Ted] that will shake the world alive. Even as he sees into my poems and will work with me to make me a woman poet like the world will gape at . . .” [May 3, 1956] “I am so glad you and Warren are coming this summer, so you can meet him [Ted]. If only you both will just take him for what he is, in his whole self, without wealth or a slick 10-year guarantee for a secure job, of a house and car—just for his native dearness, story-telling, poem-making, nature-loving, humorous, rugged self—I am sure you will be as drawn to him as I could wish. To find such a man, to make him into the best man the world has seen: such a life work! . . . I know I was not meant to be a single woman, a career woman, and this is my reward for waiting and waiting and not accepting all the lesser tempting offers which would have betrayed my capacity for growing beyond thought into the fulness of my middle and late years. ” [May 9, 1956] Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
