Status Updates From The Power Notebooks: aantek...

Feels like it fits perfectly with recent reads of Motherhood and After Birth. A little self indulgent but I’ve been enjoying this style of self centered who I am in relation to society reflective writing. She has shared some great quotes so far - or great to me bc they feel pretty relevant. Will be a quick read

I’m devouring this. Incredible.

“Rebecca West: ‘Since men don’t love us nearly as much as we love them that leaves them a lot more spare vitality to be wonderful with.’”

“Virginia Woolf on economic independence: ‘What a change of temper a fixed income will bring about….I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.’”

“Of course, right behind the fear that I can’t manage on my own is another more terrifying fear: that I can. I am not looking. I am not happy or unhappy. It is like a peace treaty has been signed without my realizing it. The restlessness a former version of myself would have felt has been pushed away, repurposed into efficiency. It is an intoxicating feeling, not needing anyone, but also isolating in itself.”

I am loving this book. Every page is quotable. “D and I are convalescing. I’m getting over my eight years with H and the collapse of our marriage; D is getting over a girlfriend he was with for a little while. What we both need is an old-fashioned sanatorium in the Alps with wicker chaise lounges and nurses serving us iced tea and cold mountain air. What we have is each other.”

“My sister Emily once said to me, ‘There is no man anywhere so psychotic, so drunk, so helpless, so brutal, so indifferent, even just so annoying, that some woman somewhere isn’t dying to take care of him.”