Judith Thurman > Quotes

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”
― Judith Thurman

“A mad person sees what isn't there; A visionary sees what isn't there yet”
― Judith Thurman

“There's some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It's very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism.”
― Judith Thurman, Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

“And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown’s most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.”
― Judith Thurman

“You have to stand out and you have to fit in. And how you negotiate that tension really defines how fashionable you are.”
― Judith Thurman

“The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women's lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive. Seventy-five years ago, in the lower-middle-class milieu where I grew up, the career prospects for a girl who couldn't tap dance were depressingly limited. I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn't have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message that they weren't right.”
― Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

“To cool off mind and body, she went rowing on the lake in the Bois. “O healthy exercise, distract me from such thoughts that might unsettle a sturdy creature of my kind!”
― Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“He has shown himself to be someone who is worthy of my gratitude. For you understand, my child”—Colette was again writing to Germaine Patat—“everything I’m not speaking of in this letter.… Distance and reflexion have been working on me, and I am obliged to observe that I’ve been brought to this place by a well-prepared train of events, which horrifies me. I also know that the house I shall return to will be empty.”
― Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“Arkie took a dim view of patriarchal institutions - religion, capitalism, marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a woman's college: "He has to be a very good husband to e better than no husband at all.”
― Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

“my true friends always gave me this supreme proof of attachment: a spontaneous aversion to the man I loved.”
― Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“It is true that most of these men were closeted transgressors, while Colette played out her revolt in public. They were secretly attracted by her vital force. Their languor and formality were alien to her—but not their fetish worship of human beauty.”
― Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“Nothing remains to me except to be someone who has never acted in her own best interest, and who has never known a greedy passion except one: to cherish.”
― Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

“I wanted you to see my heart.”
― Judith Thurman

“It wasn't obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself, an individual, without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a "female-female impersonation.”
― Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman: Essays