17 Quotes by Daphne Merkin

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination – the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I’m not aware of being overweight.

What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation?

I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose.

Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you’ve finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you’ve never encountered before.

I also recognize, however, that you can talk yourself blue in the face in a therapist’s office about crucial failures of love or nurturance with little effect on the inner blackness you carry around with you.

Despair is always described as dull, when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.

Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us, that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist.