Daisy Alpert Florin > Quotes

“Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Somewhere along the way the balance shifts and all these boys you pine for now become men who are very afraid of being alone.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Don’t make permanent decisions to cope with temporary feelings.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I wasn’t a debater by nature and somewhere along the way had come to believe that what I felt, if it couldn’t be articulated or defended, was invalid. Maybe that’s why I thought I had to listen to Zev, who was clear in his beliefs and never wavered.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“He looked at me, then down at the floor. I could feel something fracturing, like the first time you ask your parents a question they can't answer or the first time they don't catch you in a lie. The moment you recognize your separateness.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“We parked in front of my dorm, carried in boxes, hung posters, made the bed. Then I waved goodbye to my father and began again, just like he told me to. Forgetting what I’d left behind, which was everything, and nothing.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“First, I ask myself if it's something I can fix. And if it's not, I ask myself if it's something I can live with.'
'And what if it isn't something you can live with?'
'I go back and ask myself the first question again”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“At twenty-two, I still believed adults did things because they made sense, that they had information I did not have, by virtue of being adults. I was beginning to think this might not always be the case. I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“As my mother descended into illness, slowly at first and then all at once, I started growing. As her body wasted away, mine burst into sickening bloom.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“There was something dangerous about Zev that felt exciting to me, a cold, bitter exterior I was determined to crack. He was exactly the sort of man I would avoid when I was older and knew better, but we usually learn that the hard way.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“What do you think of that one?” she asked. I looked back at the painting and tried to think of something to say. My mother had never asked me about her work before, but maybe I was old enough now to have an opinion. This one was different from her other work, more abstract and urgent, the brushstrokes wild and sensual. I tried to make out faces, eyes, recognizable parts of human forms, but everything was fractured, split open, like fruit or rot. “It scares me,” I said. My mother sat up and reached for her cigarettes. The scrape of the match was the loudest sound in the room. “That’s what your father said.” And then she stood up and walked into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“The kind of guy who wanted you to think it was so hard to do what he did that you wouldn’t try to do it, too.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“What's a promise anyway? Just a string of words. I knew as well as anyone they didn't' always mean something.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“People want to tear apart your work because they've been taught that critique is how you learn and grow. But if Andy had his way, you'd never work on that story again. You'd never work on any story. That's what critique does, shuts us down so only the strong survive.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“We took our things and staggered quietly down June Bridge Road. We’d seen too much, the world of adults revealed in all its glory and despair. I was reminded of the needlepoint designs my mother used to make that looked so perfect from the front, but when you turned them over, you could see every knot and string.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Are you a writer?” “Yes.” “Do you love it?” I answered without pause. “Yes.” She sucked in her breath. “That’s the secret, isn’t it? They want us to think it’s hard, maybe so we’ll stop. But we know it’s a gift.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“... she was right, as mothers often are, particularly in the years we are least inclined to listen to them.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“From a distance, my mother looked almost like she belonged with the other mothers on the beach, wiping noses, passing out sandwiches, pouring lemonade into Dixie cups. Like the Polish refugee I’d turned her into, my mother had always been a kind of outsider, but that week, she looked happy, and I saw what she might have been had her life taken a different direction. The reason my mother was so happy that week, the reason she’d agreed to go to Leon and Fanny’s in the first place, I found out later, was because she was planning on leaving my father when we got home. But right after we returned, she learned she had cancer and “What was the point?” She told me this later, much later, in her hospital room, while Abe was downstairs feeding the meter, when she was dying and telling me things, things I didn’t want to know.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“The bruise on the back of my head was nearly healed, but if I pressed on it, I could coax out the ache. I did that now, to remind myself I had skin, bones, a boundary that defined where I ended and someone else began.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Card in hand, I headed into the stacks, up to the fourth floor where poetry was shelved. At the end of our last class, Professor Connelly had said, “When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“As the two of us bent down to pick the papers off the dirty linoleum, I thought about something he had said to me the night we met, at that long-ago dinner at Hillel House. “Are you real?” he’d asked, right before the girl dropped the plates, before he grabbed my arm. Are you real? The words repeated in my head—are you real are you real are you real—and I pressed my knees hard against the cold tile to remind myself I was.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“as small and unimportant as I mostly felt, the egotism of youth hadn’t left me, and I placed myself firmly and squarely at the center of the universe.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“By the time I got to Wilder I’d stopped, the impulse largely dormant, which was good because I had ample opportunity. The girls here were so rich and careless, their closets overflowing with cashmere sweaters and corduroy pants, loafers and add-a-pearl necklaces, everything tossed on the floor or piled on their beds, things my years of stealing had taught me they’d never miss. But my days of wanting other people’s things were over. Also, my mother was dead so I had no more excuses.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“When I imagine Yael telling their origin story—dinner party, candlelight, glass of merlot—I have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I am facedown on the floor at their feet.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“We think our stories are personal,” he told me, “but we’re all products of our time.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“she saw things with her eyes while I felt them through the thin skin of my heart.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“What made a girl a woman? Through what mechanism did we pass from one state to another?”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“It’s not your responsibility.” But whose was it, I wondered? Who was there to catch us if not our friends?”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year