Suzanne Finnamore Quotes

Suzanne Finnamore Quotes

My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

I remember one desolate Sunday night, wondering: Is this how I´m going to spend the rest of my life? Marrid to someone who is perpetually distracted and somewhat wistful, as though a marvelous party is going on in the next room, which but for me he could be attending?

I used to loathe ambivalence; now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

So many events and moments that seemed insignificant add up. I remember how for the last Valentine´s Day, N gave flowers but no card. In restaurants, he looked off into the middle distance while my hand would creep across the table to hold his. He would always let go first. I realize I can´t remember his last spontaneous gesture of affection.

The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.

Someday I will have revenge. I know in advance to keep this to myself, and everyone will be happier. I do understand that I am expected to forgive N and his girlfriend in a timely fashion, and move on to a life of vegetarian cooking and difficult yoga positions and self-realization, and make this so much easier and more pleasant for all concerned.

Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.
Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child," I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?" I ask.

"Keep going," Christian says. "Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.

God is great and God is good," Lisa says. "But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?

Take me now, God!" I shout to the inky sky. "I´m ready."
"You´re not ready. You´re not even divorced yet," Bunny says. "You cannot die married to that man.

How can I grieve what is still in motion?" I ask her. "Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding," I say. "It´s Normandy out there.

Yes. THANK YOU. And say hello to Judas Iscariot.

I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil.

The Betty Lady explains love and splitting up: "It´s like playing the shell game with Jesus. You can´t figure anything out; it´s best not to try. You´ll just humiliate yourself.

I review what I know once again, confronting the monolith now alien and almost unconnected to me: my marriage.

I know my vision is impaired and cannot be trusted with even the simplest tasks, much less dating. Not that I´ve come within talon distance of a man.

I´ve blown it, the whole grisly charade.

I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.

It had all seemed as inevitable as sunset. Instead it was the beauty of the sun glinting upon the scythe.

For me, it´s sloth," I say. "Hedonistic sloth and escapism.

Although I notice there is never a truly good time to have a nice long chat with one´s mother-in-law, unless you are having an extraordinary life and marriage and your mother-in-law is, say, Maureen Dowd, or Indira Gandhi. Someone of that ilk.

Naturally, I do blame Françoise. I blame her for having N in the first place. She was young, she was beautiful, she was married to a doctor, and she was intelligent. She could have abstained from producing her first son. It was wrong on a variety of levels.

Très, très, triste...

A heart can stop beating for a while, one can still live.

Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.

I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.

I know one thing about men," Bunny says with finality, leaving the room to check on A. "They never die when you want them to.

He left a bit too easily and with obvious relief. His feet were swift and sure on the muddy path.

Already things are changing; it´s starting with small shit but oh it´s starting, the change, the irrevocable, impossible change.

I am going insane. Yes. That is what´s happening. Good. Insane.

I have a new mantra, which I chant softly to myself: "Oh My God Oh My God.

Bushwhacked, I examine my hands. Same hands. Rings still there but no longer valid.

It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to learn, but some people are built for it. He was handcrafted to leave, had practiced on other women since adolescence. I was one of an unnumbered series.

I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.

I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.

I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.

It´s a little song about abandonment, and it goes something like this....

I should have known then it wasn´t nothing, as he called it. But I was eight months pregnant. No sense closing the barn door now, or so I thought. I swallowed the nothing, straightaway after the usual tears and denial.

I feel angry but not homocidal; this may be unlooked-for progress.

The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.

My mind floats like ash. I blame myself most cruelly.

I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.

This people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.

This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.

The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.

Irrationally, I think, Will You Marry Me? Four words. I Want a Divorce. Four words. I would like time to count the letters as well, but there is not time.

This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference.

They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.

Flannel shirts should be outlawed for ex husbands; I realize this now. Flannel shirts are to women what crotchless panties are to men.

The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.

Conversely, I though humiliation would be everything, but it´s such a nothing.

We talk. Darlene worries aloud that her husband works with a lot of attractive young women; she herself is fourty. I tell her it´s not about age. "Little thing called character," I say, thinking, Accepting marital advice from me: the height of lunacy.

Together we agree that there are few tableaus more pathetic than a woman poring over a plethora of self-help books, while in a small café across town her husband is sharing a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and fettucini Alfredo with a beautiful woman, fondling her fishnet knee and making careful plans to escape his life.

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