Below are quotes from a really good book I just finished called, 'Entertaining Angels' by Marita Van Der Vyver.
She is a South African writer and has a very unique point of view. I loved the stories, the whole way she went about this book was very clever. I highly suggest reading this book (if you can find it?) it is short, and you can read it in a week or less. I really enjoyed it. Here are some standout quotes.
*Whatever else has changed on the continent of Africa, the deep-rooted belief in magic, both white and black, has not. Africans base their fear of witches on the argument that somebody—some person or spirit—has to be responsible for the inexplicable.
*Women actually don’t like blood. Men might be less taken with it too, if they had to wash it out of their underwear every month.
*I will carry on making a fool of myself until the day I die, and then probably fuck that up too. I mean, have you ever read about someone who was saved from suicide by a cockroach in the oven? It could only happen in reality.
*Sex could become predictable after seven years with the same man. But it was a comforting predictability, like a well-loved poem that you read over and over again until you knew it off by heart, until nothing but a punctuation mark could still surprise you.
*The worst of her sins was using words to seduce people. She was a woman who wanted to play with sentences like Salome played with her seven veils. She was a woman who wanted to write because she believed that the pen was mightier than the penis. She didn’t realize that this was the eighth deadly sin in a phallocentric world.
*I’ve never had a decent relationship with a man who didn’t have an overload of intellectual pretensions. Of course, this says a lot about my own intellectual pretensions. But the best one-night stand of my life was with a gym instructor who’d never read anything heavier than the back page of a Sunday paper. The problem with clever men is that they talk too much and don’t screw enough. The trouble with stupid men is usually the same. But every now and then you find one who knows how to shut up and use his body. Then you must hang on to what you’ve got—and bite your tongue every time he says something stupid. But that’s what you have to do with all men, anyways.
*“You hold me too tight at night,” she told him that first month. “I’m not used to it, I get too hot, it feels as though I’m suffocating.”
“You’ll just have to get used to it,” he laughed. “I can’t sleep empty-handed.”
“You never hold me at night,” she reproached him years later. “I may as well be sleeping alone.”
“I can’t hold someone at night,” he answered. “It makes me feel claustrophobic, I can’t breathe.”
*Home is where the heart is; and if you no longer have a heart, home is probably where your books and your music and your most precious memories are kept.
*Marriage is a great institution, as they say, but who wants to live in a fucking institution?
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin.
*Masturbation is still a taboo subject. Even among her friends who had no scruples about discussing sex couldn’t talk about the Lonely Deed. A woman needs a man because a vibrator can’t push a lawn-mower, ha ha ha. Was it because you did it on your own that there was so much shame attached to it? There weren’t many swear words left for the last decade of the twentieth century, but ‘alone’ had to be one of them.
*We may agree, say, that contemporary consciousness is incapable of conceiving of either angels or demons. We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, both angels and demons go on existing despite this incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them.
*What’s left to make life worth while after four miscarriages? Cigarettes give you lung cancer, marijuana makes you stupid, coffee brings on heart attacks, chocolate makes you fat, sunshine causes skin cancer, alcohol hammers your liver, money spells sleepless nights, make-up enrages the feminists, pregnancy leaves you with stretch marks, politics lead to despair and sex gives you Aids. She really couldn’t blame her children for refusing to be born.
*So this is what had become of all the witches in the world—now that they flew in Boeings instead of on broomsticks. This was how they made a living these days. They hadn’t lost their mystic powers. They’d become psychotherapists.
*Be kind to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it.
*It would be nice to find someone who doesn’t run away when the “for worse” in the “for better or for worse” happens.
*Look for a partner who’ll eat seven bags of salt with you. Strength has nothing to do with muscles.
*We don’t need an excuse. Romance is for people who feel guilty about sex.
*You’re the kind of person who has to feel guilty before you can enjoy anything.
*There’s a difference between a wish and a fantasy. It’s like, you know, whishes are impossible. I wish I was you, I wish I was a movie star, that sort of crap. But fantasy can come true. Fantasy should come true! It’s like, something you can do, something you want to do, but don’t have the guts for. It’s like fucking a complete stranger in a train going through a tunnel! The stuff movies are made of! You should act out your fantasies. Go on, be a devil.
*The devil laughs about the senselessness of everything and the angels laugh about how wonderful it all is.
*The old Goths believed that all important matters must be discussed twice. Once while you’re drunk to ensure passion and once when your sober to ensure discretion.
*I know I’ll fall in love again. I’ll carry on being idiotic until the day I die. If only it was possible to fall in love without getting hurt. I’ve had a gutful of getting hurt.
*We get braver as we get older. The older we get, the more courage we need just to get up in the morning. We don’t leap off cliffs as we used to as children, but we have to make an enormous leap of faith each day just to stay alive.
*If I could only trust my PC; I blinked yesterday and the machine swallowed three thousand words. If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it’s got a mind of its own. It so obviously does, that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.
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