Phyllis Rose Quotations

God made them? You think God made them? Did God call White Flower Farm and order the bulbs? Did God put it on his credit card? Did God dig holes for the bulbs in the fall and mix bone meal in the dirt to feed them and cover them with mulch in the winter? If you think God did that, you're an idiot!

The secret of torture, like the secret of French cuisine, is that nothing is unthinkable.

Perhaps that is what love is: the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather thanachievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.