Francine du Plessix Gray Quotes

• We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Dream, Revenge, Writing

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Writing, Interesting

  15 Copy quote

• Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Art, Reality, Vengeance

  4 Copy quote

• I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Way, Tyranny, Cease

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Generosity, Events, Meals

  6 Copy quote

• Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Friendship, Needs, Bearable

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• 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

  Mistake, Thinking, Editors

  "Conversation: Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey". Interview with Boris Kachka, nymag.com. May 30, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Death, Venture, Possibility

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Deceit, Naked, Body

  Francine Du Plessix Gray (1987). “Adam & Eve and the City: Selected Non Fiction”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Self, Discrepancies Between

  "Conversation: Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey". Interview with Boris Kachka, nymag.com. May 30, 2005.

  6 Copy quote

• one forgives parents as naturally as one emancipates oneself from them - usually shortly afterward.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Parent, Forgiving, Oneself

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• 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

  Time, Age, Violent

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Team, Artist, Tennis

  8 Copy quote

• The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Civilization, Choices, Exotic

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Two, People, Parent

  "Conversation: Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey". Interview with Boris Kachka, nymag.com.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Catching On

  "Conversation: Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey". Interview with Boris Kachka, nymag.com.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Writing, Giving

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Ocean, Hawaii, Mysterious

  Francine Du Plessix Gray (1972). “Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress”

  4 Copy quote

• Oh, save me God, but not quite yet.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Save Me

  Francine du Plessix Gray (1981). “World without end: a novel”, Simon & Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Thinking, Parent, Seventies

  "Conversation: Francine du Plessix Gray and Sean Wilsey". Interview with Boris Kachka, nymag.com. May 30, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  War, Parent, Scratches

  4 Copy quote

• Lovers, children, heroes, none of them do we fantasize as extravagantly as we fantasize our parents.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Children, Hero, Parent

  Francine du Plessix Gray (1983). “World Without End”, Playboy Mass Market Paperbacks

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Desire, Novelists, United States

  10 Copy quote

• how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  France, Stew

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Destiny, Hawaii

  Francine Du Plessix Gray (1973). “Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress”

  4 Copy quote

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