9 Quotes by Gin Phillips

I hand over a lot of things when I'm home. Mom tells me she doesn't like my shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one -I hand that over too. It's easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box -even if the box is inside your head -and store it away for yourself.

Life is blood and death and fear and joy and fierce architecture, man.

You cannot know a wild thing.

A considerable part of parenting is pretending moods that you do not entirely feel.

That is what you do when you have a child, isn’t it, open yourself up to unimaginable pain and then try to pretend away the possibilities.

She inhales slow and long. The tremors have stopped. She is still and solid and ready, a thing carved for a purpose.

With a lover you might have a perfect comfort with each other’s body, a sense that his body belongs to you and yours to him, and you might have total unselfconscious freedom to put a hand on his thigh, to put your mouth on his in the way you know he likes best, for him to curl around you in bed, pelvis to pelvis – but the two of you are still, ultimately, two different bodies, and the pleasure comes from the difference.

She doesn’t picture them as Arabic – she has been wondering, of course. But they do not sound like that kind of terrorist. They sound like young, obnoxious white men – aren’t they always young white men? – and she is not sure whether this makes them more or less dangerous than fanatics on a jihad.

Such a system of checks and balances – parenting – of projections and guesswork and cost-benefit ratios.