Alison Fell Quotes
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Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.
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She remembers these as happy times - tomboy days, when she still glittered like quartz in her father's eye. Until puberty came along, as puberty will, and shattered the cosy sense of conspiracy.
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She'd been a hard taskmistress - How can you be a grown-up if you can't look after yourself? she'd challenged - but she had taught him what no Greek mother ever taught a son: the basic humdrum skills required for independence.
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Give a bull grass, sweet water and a willing heifer and he is happy. But a man is never content. If no gadflies of worry exist he will invent them.
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New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.
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All young people believed they were immortal, and he had personal experience of the methods they used to cull themselves - base-jumping, sky-diving, hard drugs, alcohol. Over the years he'd come to see solid sense in the ways so-called savage peoples formalised their rituals of manhood; without such regulation, young men seemed compelled to invent their own, even more lethal, rites of passage.
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The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalising, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants certainly - up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess - but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued.
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Earlier, watching her apply mascara with ritual concentration, he'd wondered just how beautiful a woman had to be before she believed it.