So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right–a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way. The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear–until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right, ” and “Whatever you think is best, ” and “You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world, ” and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums–earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together on this thing” when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like– Shep Campbell! –and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. (p.416-7) . Richard Yates
Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations, needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding. But it never happens...
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Chitralekha Paul
Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.
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Zsa Zsa Gabor
Marriage without struggle is like an unfired clay pot. It is easily made, but it will not stand the test of time.
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Allan Wolf
Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.
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Groucho Marx
Romance isn't just about pink balloons and heart-shaped cards. It is something much deeper. He put a hand to his heart. Here, where it matters, men are more caring. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Ask any young woman what kind of man she wants to marry and the...
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Farahad Zama
More Quotes By Richard Yates
Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important...
If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.
Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.
So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work,...
You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t that amazing? He really does think that way; these words...
