Francine du Plessix Gray famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Dream #Revenge #Writing
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

#Lying #Writing #Interesting
The irreversibility of time. That's the hardest thing to accept at our age, that's the most violent aspect of death.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Time #Age #Violent
I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Death #Venture #Possibility
how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#France #Stew
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

#Ocean #Hawaii #Mysterious
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

#Desire #Novelists #United States
Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Children #Hero #Parent
one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Parent #Forgiving #Oneself
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

#Thanksgiving #Mad #Bird
The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Civilization #Choices #Exotic
Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Art #Reality #Vengeance
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

#Team #Artist #Tennis
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

#Deceit #Naked #Body
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

#Spiritual #Destiny #Hawaii
Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. Iâ€™ve sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Teaching #Love Is #Laughing
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

#Children #Writing #Giving
Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Save Me
I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Way #Tyranny
Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.
-- Francine du Plessix Gray

#Friendship #Needs #Bearable
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

#Generosity #Events #Meals

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