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Mating

Norman Rush

Top 10 Best Quotes

“For me love is like this: you're in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You're happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it's breathtaking, a surprise, something you've done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you're delighted again.”

“Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.”

“One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.”

“You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.”

“What a datum! I couldn't help thinking over and over.”

“This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligen​t guys present, not strobe-lig​ht intellects but people who could make you uncomforta​ble in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on.”

“In love and mating, ambience is central.”

“utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.”

“said Let’s just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it. This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table.”

“This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick-so, good.”

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