#francine prose

[perfectfeelings]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[thoughtkick]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[thehopefulquotes]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Francine Prose - Marie Laveau - Berkley - 1978

[stay-close]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[surqrised]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[thespilledquotes]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[luthienne]

I wondered how often the future waits on the other side of the wall, knocking very quietly, too politely for us to hear, and I was filled with longing to reach back into my life and inform that unhappy girl: all around her was physical evidence proving her sorrows would end. I wanted to tell her that she would be saved, but not by an act of will: clever Gretel pretending she couldn't tell if the oven was hot and tricking the witch into showing her and shoving the witch in the oven. What would rescue her was time itself and, above all, its inexorability, the utter impossibility of anything ever staying the same.

Francine Prose, from Hansel and Gretel, as featured in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

[perfectquote]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[exhaled-spirals]

« Only recently, reading Anna Funder’s “Wifedom,” did I discover a new fact (or perhaps a new theory) about “Animal Farm”: Orwell wrote it in collaboration with his first wife, Eileen. “The form of the book itself — as fable, novel, satire — was Eileen’s idea. She steered him away from writing a critical essay on Stalin and totalitarianism.” Funder cites Orwell biographer Tosco Fyvel: “If Animal Farm is a tale so perfect in its light touch and restraint (almost ‘unOrwellian’), I think some of the credit is due to the conversational influence of Eileen and the light touch of her bright humorous intelligence.”

[...] Early on, Funder tells us that “Orwell’s work is precious to me. I don’t want to take it, or him, down in any way.” But it’s hard to imagine a more ferocious takedown than the one Funder launches with her catalogue of Orwell’s appalling misdeeds. In Morocco, he asked for (and apparently received) Eileen’s permission to sleep with a very young local prostitute. After years spent attempting to seduce Eileen’s friend Lydia Jackson, he crawled into Jackson’s bed. She recalled trying to “ward him off from forcing himself on me.” He appears to have taken a rather lighthearted view of sexual assault and of his own attempts to “pounce” on women who resisted him. And he consistently undervalued Eileen’s contributions to his domestic and professional life: typing manuscripts, dealing with editors, nursing him through bouts of illness, cleaning out the latrine that overflowed, disgustingly, in their yard.

[...] The book’s most interesting section concerns the time Orwell spent fighting against Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War — an experience he wrote about in “Homage to Catalonia.” Eileen was also in Spain at that time, leading a busy, challenging and frequently dangerous existence, working at the Barcelona office of the British Independent Labour Party, outwitting Stalinist spies, trying to help friends and co-workers who were arrested and, in some cases, executed. When Orwell was wounded at the front, she rushed to his side, but her presence there — like most of what she did in Spain — went unremarked in his book. “Orwell spends over 2,500 words telling us of his hospital treatment without mentioning that Eileen was there. I wonder what she felt, later, as she typed them.” »

— Review by Francine Prose of Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom’ in The Washington Post

[perfectfeelings]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[quotefeeling]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[a-ramblinrose]

Picking what book to read when I escort my grams on her daily walk is always interesting. It must be easy to read while walking (lightweight is best) and something I can talk to Grams about (nothing smutty or overly fantasy). I mostly go for poetry or nonfiction because our taste in fiction barely overlaps.

[nightlyquotes]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[stay-close]

We never believe we’re beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Francine Prose

[iirulancorrino]

Though Cleopatra was born—and apparently thought of herself as—a Macedonia Greek, all that mattered to her Roman contemporaries was that she was not a Roman and, more important, that her existence, her influence, and her power constituted an obstacle to Roman expansion. She was a force to be destroyed or encouraged to destroy herself so that the empire could prevail. Her gender, her exoticized "Easternness," and her determination to protect her country's autonomy helped explain why Egypt was thought to need the moral, political and practical guidance of Rome—and why Cleopatra did in fact need the support and allegiance of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. It is hard not to notice how profoundly her gender determined the way in which her story has been told. Despite the evidence of her achievements—the kingdom she ruled, the city she helped build, the seeming ease with which she navigated between the two worlds of Rome and Egypt—she is generally better known for seducing, managing, and manipulating her Roman lovers, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. The Romans were the first of many to depict Cleopatra as a cruel Asiatic queen, all greedy ambition and no moral conscience. Alexandre Cabanel's 1887 orientalist painting, Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, shows the queen lounging on her sofa as prisoners—guinea pigs for her testing of deadly toxins—die in agony around her. The story of a woman who recklessly destroys men, or who is responsible for our eternal exile from the Garden of Eden, or who incites a ruthless murder or a catastrophic war has never gone out of fashion.

Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth by Francine Prose, from the Yale University Press Ancient Lives series