Quotes by Frank Gilbert

“Can I ask you something, Vivian?” he said after a while. “Certainly.” “Does it make you happy?” “Being with all those men, you mean?” “Yes.” I gave this question real consideration. He hadn’t asked it in an accusing way. I think he genuinely wished to comprehend me. And I’m not sure I’d ever pondered it before. I didn’t want to take the question lightly. “It makes me satisfied, Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men”

“I can’t be certain that Frank and I would have felt the same depth of love and tenderness for each other, had sex ever been part of our story. Sex is so often a cheat, a short cut of intimacy, a way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing instead their mere body. So we were devoted to each other in our own way.””

“The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow.””

“Alma had grown as tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders. ... This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile--at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man. It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father....””

“I’m too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I’m too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone”

“Moreover, when I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tenderhearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them.””

“The party of technocrats and consultants”

“makes me satisfied, Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men”

“It makes me satisfied, Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men”

“All those distant neighborhoods that we had explored together on foot were no longer open to me. They weren’t places a woman could go alone”

“Moreover, I can’t say I ever fantasized about marrying him. In general, of course, the thought of marriage gave me a hemmed-in feeling, and I didn’t long for it with anyone. But certainly not with Frank. I couldn’t imagine us sitting at a breakfast table, talking over a newspaper. Planning vacations. That picture didn’t look like either of us.””

“But your Daddy chose to be a writer and the two of you were frankly fucked. All because I liked how it sounded in my head”

“In 1996, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the independent panel of experts that reviews screening tests, recommended against routine fetal monitoring.5 But according to their current Web site, fetal monitoring has become such an ingrained fixture of medical care that, frankly, the task force seems to have simply given up on trying to dissuade doctors from using it: Despite the lack of evidence on its positive impact on health outcomes and the 1996 USPSTF recommendation against its routine use, intrapartum electronic fetal monitoring in pregnancy has become common practice in the U.S. Based on currently available evidence, the USPSTF believes there would be limited potential impact on clinical practice in updating the 1996 recommendation. The””