20 Quotes by Francine du Plessix Gray

The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

I think we’re much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

The irreversibility of time. That’s the hardest thing to accept at our age, that’s the most violent aspect of death.

I didn’t find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

I think it’s one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn’t have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven’s heat on that poor bird.

Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I’ve sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.