The Odd Woman and the City
Vivian Gornick
My 5 highlights
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She took lovers easily and frequently,
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The plates were gold-rimmed china, the wineglasses thin crystal, the forks heavy silver. The food was delicious, but there wasn’t enough of it. The wine, however, flowed.
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On the very last day of my twenties I married a scientist, a man of brooding temperament who had taken eighteen years to complete his dissertation.
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As the tone, syntax, and vocabulary of this group were foreign to me, I did not at first grasp the banality of the conversation. People introduced subjects in order to allude, not to discuss.
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New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive.