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She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

J. Courtney Sullivan

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J. Courtney Sullivan
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: August 10
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Every
Hold
Cleaning
Free
Wanting
Wish
Page
Musty
Father
Dirty
Handkerchief
Felt
Remembered
Handkerchiefs
Else
Anywhere
Sheet
Earth
Pages
Wishing
Much
Clothes
Sheets

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I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.
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Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
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Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.
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Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while Im walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
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I love the smell of a mans skin.
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Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.
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If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.
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We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.
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The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.
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I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
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In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.
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When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.
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A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.
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For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.
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When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.
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She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.
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You all seem to think that you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect that the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.
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