Topics of Conversation Quotes

“To indicate interest is already to expose oneself to humiliation. To admit the existence of a desired object is to admit that to be rejected by the desired object, to admit that the desired object's disappearance, one of the two always inevitable, even if only in death, will be painful.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that's what narrative's for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it's harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you've grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn't do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“To flirt was to expose one's desires, an act inherently shaming.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“What I’m saying is that my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The point is I'm always—my mind's always—there's a churning inside, you know?”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Am I, just now, more interested in appearing openly louche (look at me lapping at luxury) or secretly wounded? How close to the surface is my pain? Or, rather, how close to the surface do I want my pain to appear to be? How enamored am I of the clichés of female pain? Or, rather, of which of these clichés am I enamored? Do I wish to make my distress visible and, therefore, hysterical? Or do I wish to suffer in silence?”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Nothing is more desirable than that which is being withheld.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It's like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Did I, do I, admire the artist for claiming her pain is worthy of art, or did I, do I, find the act of aestheticizing also trivializing, or in fact is that feeling, that impulse to call the art trivializing, a way to conceal the true feeling, guiltier, that her art is vulgar, that it is indulgent, because she is her own subject? Because she elevates herself as subject? The woman as object is less vulgar than the woman as subject. The woman as object is art and the man who objectifies her an artist. The woman as subject, well. Just a narcissistic bitch, isn't she? Not that I believe these. Not that I do not believe this.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Knowing someone, it’s one part divination, two parts force.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I don't know what I was hoping for. Some kind of magic, obviously.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times its barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“This is female socialization, that is, the desire to be everywhere approved of, carried to its logical extreme.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The problem wasn't thinking of myself as the protagonist of a narrative it was that I hadn't figured out the right narrative yet.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“One searches, in one’s choice of partner, for a kind of reflection. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Often unconsciously. And often not an honest reflection. One searches for a better-than reflection. An as-I-wish-I-were reflection.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“I think," she said, "I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love." . . .

"What do you think the story is about now?" . . .

"Sometimes I think it's a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn't accidental, him confiding in me, just then." Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it's I want you to think that I trust you with this.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“You, I said to my reflection in the mirror, are a real bitch.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“It was his desperation I despised.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“No one has a plan for you and your life doesn't have a soundtrack, it's just a series of . . . accidents and split-second decisions and coincidences and demographics, where you live and when you were born and who your parents were and how much money they had.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story's protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn't, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Also . . . I didn't realize how many times he'd told the story. I should have known, how polished it was. The practiced hesitations. I thought he was opening a door. And that on the other side of the door was—intimacy, I guess. Only it was just a room. A crowded one.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Did I, do I, admire the artist for claiming her pain is worthy of art, or did I, do I, find the act of aestheticizing also trivializing, or in fact is that feeling, that impulse to call the art trivializing, a way to conceal the true feeling, guiltier, that her art is vulgar, that it is indulgent, because she is her own subject? Because she elevates herself as subject? The woman as object is less vulgar than the woman as subject. The woman as object is art and the man who objectifies her an artist. The woman as subject, well. Just a narcissistic bitch, isn't she? Not that I believe this. Not that I do not believe this.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Do my words sound cold, even cruel? Perhaps it helps to know that as I said this, I was smiling.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Trapped, yes, but in a hedge maze of her own careful design.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“But I had never had a self I was much interested in keeping . . .”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Later I understood that his ugliness gave him power. Or anyway it made him mean, and if you're a white man, being mean, usually you get what you want.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Truth didn't help. Everything that had ever happened could never be integrated into something coherent. The trick was picking the right moments. The trick was knowing when to lie.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“Good intentions, sure, but when have they ever been enough.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation

“He can always decide to turn around.”
― Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation