Maureen Howard Quotes

• I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

  Maureen Howard

  Writing, Imagination, Together

  6 Copy quote

• I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have.

  Maureen Howard

  Want

  4 Copy quote

• When I go home my mother and I play a cannibal game; we eat each other over the years, tender morsel by morsel until there is nothing left but dry bone and wig. She is winning-needless to say she has had so much more experience.

  Maureen Howard

  Mother, Home, Winning

  Maureen Howard (1965). “Bridgeport Bus”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

• Acceptance is the word we must substitute for dependence in dealing with the aged. Their acceptance of help, ours of their need.

  Maureen Howard

  Acceptance, Needs, Helping

  4 Copy quote

• None of the adults I knew ever touched in public, much less kneaded each others flesh.

  Maureen Howard

  Adults, Flesh, Modesty

  4 Copy quote

• Even when I was a grown woman, he [Father] would leave me on the edge of hysteria in all our arguments: though I married and lived as far as I could spiritually from Bridgeport, he reduced me in a matter of hours to a wriggling child, pleading to go free.

  Maureen Howard

  Children, Father, Hysteria

  4 Copy quote

• The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us.

  Maureen Howard

  Women, Play, Want

  Maureen Howard (1965). “Bridgeport Bus”, Penguin Group USA

  6 Copy quote

• Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

  Maureen Howard

  Potatoes, Common, Hindsight

  4 Copy quote

• To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois.

  Maureen Howard

  Bourgeois

  4 Copy quote

• Wouldn't a laugh serve us better than to battle it out with our mortal souls?

  Maureen Howard

  Laughter, Laughing, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love.

  Maureen Howard

  Self, Giving, Identity

  4 Copy quote

• If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.

  Maureen Howard

  Family, Children, Father

  4 Copy quote

• The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

  Maureen Howard

  Christian, Mother, Father

  4 Copy quote

• There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed.

  Maureen Howard

  Betrayal, Men, Odor

  7 Copy quote

• I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom of some cruelly bred plant; admiration for the world spread for the world to see on my gullible face-unlike my other face with the sour look of a starved peasant.

  Maureen Howard

  Sight, Looks, World

  Maureen Howard (1965). “Bridgeport Bus”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

• The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.

  Maureen Howard

  Simple, Mcdonalds, Arches

  17 Copy quote

• It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.

  Maureen Howard

  Writing, Hair, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative.

  Maureen Howard

  Moving, Book, New Beginnings

  "Notable American Women". Book by Ben Marcuso, www.penguinrandomhouse.com. March 19, 2002.

  7 Copy quote

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