Melinda

“The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it’s the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“She shouldn't have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she'd had for so very, very long.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife.
'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'
...the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again...”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies