Francine Du Plessix Gray Quotes & Sayings

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at The New Yorker, and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

One forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

A heart of fire in a shell of ice. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

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

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

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

In Aristotle ... leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work ... leisure is pursued solely for its own sake ... : the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ... gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium - the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.
We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul ... during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships ... in loafing, most of our innovations come ... the routine of daily work has too often served as ... sleep ... a refuge from two crucial states - awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes ... loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

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

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

How the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

Like most writers I know, I love being on stage. I've sublimated the dramatic urge by teaching and by making people laugh. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

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

Oh, save me God, but not quite yet. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

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

Mine [parents] started out more from scratch, because I'm constantly aware of what they suffered in the war. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it. — Francine Du Plessix Gray