Madeline’s Reviews > The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex > Status Update

“Heterosexual scripts were so clear and loud. There was a beautiful simplicity to them, a relief in yielding to their small violences, in joining the collective movement toward that impossible goal: to be wanted. As if that were an end point, a place where we might arrive and set up camp.”

“As long as she thinks of a man, no one objects to a woman thinking.” - Virginia Woolf

“It was frightening to confront the fact of one’s own propensity for self betrayal. It had been narrow escape. The part of me who wanted to leave had only the thinnest advantage over that older instinct that compelled me to stay.”

“To quit something is to leave it, to remove oneself from the sight of it. We quit jobs, gambling, biting our nails, and sometimes people. To give something up is to relinquish it; to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one’s hands for other holdings. It is more surrender than departure.”