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I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.
Francine du Plessix Gray
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Francine du Plessix Gray
Age: 88 †
Born: 1930
Born: September 25
Died: 2019
Died: January 13
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More quotes by Francine du Plessix Gray
As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.
Francine du Plessix Gray
I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as a child in the playground of creation.
Francine du Plessix Gray
one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?
Francine du Plessix Gray
The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.
Francine du Plessix Gray
If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war.
Francine du Plessix Gray
We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.
Francine du Plessix Gray
The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.
Francine du Plessix Gray
I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.
Francine du Plessix Gray
I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.
Francine du Plessix Gray
I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.
Francine du Plessix Gray
One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.
Francine du Plessix Gray
The spiritual destiny of Hawaii has been shaped by a Calvinist theory of paternalism enacted by the descendants of the missionaries who had carried it there: a will to do good for unfortunates regardless of what the unfortunates thought about it.
Francine du Plessix Gray
The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.
Francine du Plessix Gray
