Ruthie

“Men used to bring me violets and now they bring me Scotch. Liquor isn’t a gift to a woman, it’s just an investment in her.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“I was twenty-seven. More than a thousand crowded days intervened between myself and that younger woman who be- lieved she could not live without Peter. When, rarely, now, I was reminded of the Peter I had known, I thought of him kindly, as someone with whom I had shared a painful postadolescence, someone who no doubt had been as bewildered as I about most things. He and I were married and had a child and separated, before either of us grew up.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“I hate him; I’m never going to see him again. I’m going to kiss so many other men I shan’t remember what he was like. He says I’m a slut; I’ll be a slut, but never with him, again. Lucia, why did he do this to me?”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

“Tell me some philosophy that’s not adolescent. Self- expression—the new freedom for women-Freud, that Great Excuse?”

“There is progress, though, Lucia. Myself, I’ve progressed, in taste, from Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway.”

“How much progress is that?”

“A damn long distance on the road to bigger and broader vocabularies.”
― Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife