Lily King Quotes & Sayings

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she'd studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a possum walks alone was the Tam's most repeated one. — Lily King

conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences. — Lily King

He didn't answer, but I wasn't bothered. I was flattered that we'd gotten to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology. We passed through a long swath of fireflies, thousands of them flashing all round us, and it felt like soaring through stars. — Lily King

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. — Lily King

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words. — Lily King

Who can explain why a few words in a particular tone can clear acres of sudden unfamiliarity? ...Would that person look up and grin, and find him grinning back, full of the sweet miraculous relief of having been perfectly received? ...He was saying, if it's not carrots, it's something else; he was saying, How futile life is, the slicing of carrots, the eating of meals; he was saying, How wonderful life is, to come home to the security of carrots in the kitchen; he was saying, Another day come to its devastating close. He was saying all this and I heard him because he was like me, entirely ambivalent about life. It was almost a question: Should I be full of joy or despair, Rosie? Joy, my face always replied to him, not because I felt sure that was the answer, but because I'd begun to want to make it his. — Lily King

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong. — Lily King

I felt in some ways we'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words... — Lily King

Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life. — Lily King

She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women. — Lily King

Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy. When I tried to explain that my grandmother was my imagined audience for Children of the KK, I think he was embarrassed for me. These conversations with B keep coming back. Perhaps because Fen doesn't enjoy talking about work with me anymore. I feel him withholding, as if he thinks I'll use his ideas in my next book if he says them out loud. — Lily King

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She — Lily King

She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. Look at Malinowski, she said. Look at Boas. They defined their cultures as they saw them, as they understood the natives' point of view. The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is "natural." 'Even if I manage that, the next person who comes here will tell a different story about the Kiona.' 'No doubt.' 'Then what is the point?' I said. 'This is no different from the laboratory. What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more. — Lily King

Come down here so I can kill you, the man said to the moon, for you have stolen my wife. The moon laughed. Every woman is my wife first, he said. So in fact you stole this wife from me. This only made the man angrier and he climbed the tree to the highest branch and pulled at the raffia string. It would not move so he began to climb the string toward the moon. Soon his arms grew heavy and though he had climbed far from the tree he still was no closer to the moon. Let go now, the moon said. And the man, who had no more strength left, let go and fell directly into his canoe and paddled home to share his wife, as all men did, with the moon. — Lily King

If I smiled at her she smiled back, and there were times I half pretended, half believed, she was my wife. — Lily King

Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared. — Lily King

Personality depends on context, just like culture. Certain people bring out certain traits in each other [...] You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. — Lily King

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. — Lily King

There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people. — Lily King

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion? — Lily King

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her. — Lily King

Hello and goodbye are the same. Baya ban," she said. "As many times as you can stand it. — Lily King

Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,' I said. 'They mourn.' 'They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn't tragic.' 'No, it isn't. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There's no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there's been a terrible mistake, isn't it? — Lily King

I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished. — Lily King

The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly. — Lily King

Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life. — Lily King

I has a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed. — Lily King

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing. — Lily King

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model. — Lily King

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love. — Lily King

He didn't like her strong, nor did he like her weak. — Lily King

The initiate, a boy of no more than twelve, was wailing and a group of older boys were holding him down on a log while a few men cut into him, making hundreds of small slits on his back and shoulders. They dropped a citrus mixture into each wound so that the skin would puff up and the scars would be raised and textured to look like crocodile skin. His blood had soaked the log in dark striations. When they were done they painted him with oil and turmeric and smeared him with white clay and carried him off weeping and half conscious into seclusion until he healed. Fen and I walked down to the beach. I'd seen dozens — Lily King

Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes? — Lily King

I sat next to a woman called Tadi and I asked her what she would do with the shells she earned and she said her husband would use them to buy another wife. 'I cannot make this bag fast enough,' she said. We all fell over laughing. — Lily King

A year and a half up that little tributary somewhere?' Tillie said. 'Good God, — Lily King

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies! — Lily King

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead. — Lily King

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell. — Lily King

But you can't have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she's Southern but she's not on the Grid. She's a different type altogether. Trust me on that one. — Lily King

I can't swim, so you better join me. — Lily King

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. — Lily King

It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes. — Lily King

She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. — Lily King

I didn't want to miss the euphoria. I haven't, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark. — Lily King

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story. — Lily King

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? — Lily King

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable. — Lily King

You don't struggle with these questions?"

"No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have."

"An American flaw. — Lily King

I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come. — Lily King

It came to him that he didn't like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . . — Lily King

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication. — Lily King

1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes. — Lily King

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form. — Lily King

I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. 'Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.' She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny. 'I love you,' she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no. — Lily King

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake. — Lily King

I've also done things that put me in odd situations. — Lily King

I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group. — Lily King

So much of this trip had been spent gazing at spectacular sights, which always filled me, as this one did now, with agonizing frustration. Why couldn't I simply accept and enjoy beauty? What was it that stirred up this terrible discomfort? ...We agreed it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death. — Lily King

But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time. — Lily King

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense. — Lily King

And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. — Lily King

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. — Lily King

Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential. — Lily King

I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go. — Lily King

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally. — Lily King

You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist. — Lily King

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell. — Lily King

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth. — Lily King

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy. — Lily King

I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. — Lily King

Why are we, with all our "progress," so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? ... I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. — Lily King

My mind has circled back again to that conversation with Helen on the steps of Schermerhorn about how each culture has a flavor. What she said that night comes back to me at least once a day. Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years? — Lily King

That night at Gertie's when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn't say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn't know the difference then. — Lily King

They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction. — Lily King

mind Nell was writing: - ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers - paint on face only — Lily King

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along. — Lily King

For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating — Lily King

I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed. — Lily King

Don't you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can't be without power - it doesn't work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves. — Lily King

I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe. — Lily King

Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible. — Lily King

Both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. — Lily King

-Can we have one day when we don't have to talk about the meaning of life?
-I don't think we ever talk about anything else. — Lily King

I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or Gods, or the crocodile. — Lily King

Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there. — Lily King

I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. — Lily King

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? — Lily King

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain. — Lily King

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages? — Lily King

I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be. — Lily King

But I don't trust a crowds - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain, find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is exactly my point. — Lily King

Tears are not endless. — Lily King

You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. What — Lily King

I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all. — Lily King

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine. — Lily King

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating. — Lily King

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying. — Lily King

Is the good scientist allowed artistic license? — Lily King

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. — Lily King

he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother's body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. — Lily King