Norman Rush > Quotes

“Literature is humanity talking to itself.”
― Norman Rush

“The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.”
― Norman Rush

“It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“For me love is like this: you're in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You're happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it's breathtaking, a surprise, something you've done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you're delighted again.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“Small breasts are best for the long haul.”
― Norman Rush, Mortals

“Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“The characters write the plot. Their natures do.”
― Norman Rush

“Now everything was going to be impossible, but better.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“There is no permanent friendship between men, among men. Something goes wrong, somebody marries the wrong person, somebody advances too fast, somebody converts, somebody refuses good advice or bad advice, it didn't matter. It went up in a flash.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligen​t guys present, not strobe-lig​ht intellects but people who could make you uncomforta​ble in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“Nina said, “Have regular facial expressions.” That was a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“In love and mating, ambience is central.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“He was mixing up friendship with acts and atmospheres from the deluded matrix the boys had lived in for a heartbeat in the seventies. She thought, I am your friend, you idiot, and I let you into my perfect body, for Christ’s sake.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies

“What a datum! I couldn't help thinking over and over.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“All the way home I flattered myself that I had at least gotten into the foyer of his consciousness. Sometimes I believed it. In any case, he would see my face again.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“said Let’s just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it. This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“I love to talk, needless to say. Also I was pleased at how much of his rap I was getting, even if it was slightly outside my academic bailiwick. I love to talk. For a woman, I’m even considered a raconteuse. I remember jokes, for example. But then I also remember everything.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“The celerity with which people recognize something is spilt milk is a main measure of their rationality.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“What I was suddenly afraid of was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion.”
― Norman Rush

“This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick-so, good.”
― Norman Rush, Mating

“Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates”
― Norman Rush, Mating