My Last Innocent Year Quotes

“Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I wasn’t a debater by nature and somewhere along the way had come to believe that what I felt, if it couldn’t be articulated or defended, was invalid. Maybe that’s why I thought I had to listen to Zev, who was clear in his beliefs and never wavered.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Somewhere along the way the balance shifts and all these boys you pine for now become men who are very afraid of being alone.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Don’t make permanent decisions to cope with temporary feelings.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“He looked at me, then down at the floor. I could feel something fracturing, like the first time you ask your parents a question they can't answer or the first time they don't catch you in a lie. The moment you recognize your separateness.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“We parked in front of my dorm, carried in boxes, hung posters, made the bed. Then I waved goodbye to my father and began again, just like he told me to. Forgetting what I’d left behind, which was everything, and nothing.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“There was something dangerous about Zev that felt exciting to me, a cold, bitter exterior I was determined to crack. He was exactly the sort of man I would avoid when I was older and knew better, but we usually learn that the hard way.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“At twenty-two, I still believed adults did things because they made sense, that they had information I did not have, by virtue of being adults. I was beginning to think this might not always be the case. I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“We took our things and staggered quietly down June Bridge Road. We’d seen too much, the world of adults revealed in all its glory and despair. I was reminded of the needlepoint designs my mother used to make that looked so perfect from the front, but when you turned them over, you could see every knot and string.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“From a distance, my mother looked almost like she belonged with the other mothers on the beach, wiping noses, passing out sandwiches, pouring lemonade into Dixie cups. Like the Polish refugee I’d turned her into, my mother had always been a kind of outsider, but that week, she looked happy, and I saw what she might have been had her life taken a different direction. The reason my mother was so happy that week, the reason she’d agreed to go to Leon and Fanny’s in the first place, I found out later, was because she was planning on leaving my father when we got home. But right after we returned, she learned she had cancer and “What was the point?” She told me this later, much later, in her hospital room, while Abe was downstairs feeding the meter, when she was dying and telling me things, things I didn’t want to know.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“As my mother descended into illness, slowly at first and then all at once, I started growing. As her body wasted away, mine burst into sickening bloom.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Card in hand, I headed into the stacks, up to the fourth floor where poetry was shelved. At the end of our last class, Professor Connelly had said, “When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“The kind of guy who wanted you to think it was so hard to do what he did that you wouldn’t try to do it, too.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“The bruise on the back of my head was nearly healed, but if I pressed on it, I could coax out the ache. I did that now, to remind myself I had skin, bones, a boundary that defined where I ended and someone else began.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“... she was right, as mothers often are, particularly in the years we are least inclined to listen to them.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“What's a promise anyway? Just a string of words. I knew as well as anyone they didn't' always mean something.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“People want to tear apart your work because they've been taught that critique is how you learn and grow. But if Andy had his way, you'd never work on that story again. You'd never work on any story. That's what critique does, shuts us down so only the strong survive.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“What do you think of that one?” she asked. I looked back at the painting and tried to think of something to say. My mother had never asked me about her work before, but maybe I was old enough now to have an opinion. This one was different from her other work, more abstract and urgent, the brushstrokes wild and sensual. I tried to make out faces, eyes, recognizable parts of human forms, but everything was fractured, split open, like fruit or rot. “It scares me,” I said. My mother sat up and reached for her cigarettes. The scrape of the match was the loudest sound in the room. “That’s what your father said.” And then she stood up and walked into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“When I imagine Yael telling their origin story—dinner party, candlelight, glass of merlot—I have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I am facedown on the floor at their feet.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I walked into the living room and remembered the summer she died, right before I left for Wilder. When it was all over, Abe stayed in his room, coming out only to get food from the kitchen, where a parade of women left a continuously replenished supply. Manny handled everything at the store, and I was alone and rudderless. A few of my high school friends were still around, but no one knew what to say to me, and I didn’t want to talk to them either. The only person I wanted to talk to was Abe. Whenever I heard him come out of his bedroom, I would place myself in his path. Talk to me, I wanted to say but never did. When he finally emerged after eight days, he bagged up my mother’s things, and when he was done, he put on his apron and went back to work.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“that I allowed myself to think about Igraine, always at the end of the day, when the late afternoon sun moved across my desk like a beacon. And when I did, I often thought about calling Connelly. Once, I even dialed the first six digits of his phone number before remembering that I couldn’t. It felt like dreams I used to have after my mother died. The phone would ring and it would be her. “Where have you been?” I would ask her. “I have so much to tell you.” And I’d fill her in on everything she had missed. Because of course I couldn’t call Connelly”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“I’d imagined it as austere, holy, the kind of place my mother always said she wanted, where she could go for peace and quiet, to hear herself think. The kind of retreat I sensed even then belonged only to men.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Are you a writer?” “Yes.” “Do you love it?” I answered without pause. “Yes.” She sucked in her breath. “That’s the secret, isn’t it? They want us to think it’s hard, maybe so we’ll stop. But we know it’s a gift.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Something changed between us that day. I’d seen Debra at her worst, and I’ve found that is often what binds women together. Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“Let me see that,” she said, grabbing the letter. “‘I believe my dedication to excellence and strong interpersonal skills make me a prime candidate for this position.’ Please—Marcus Wainwright wouldn’t know strong interpersonal skills if they fucked him in the ass. I can’t believe these frat guys are going to run the world.” She handed the letter back to me, then rested her head on the desk.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“He kissed me and I forgot about Roxanne and Joanna and Tom, Andy and Kara, Debra, Zev. I forgot about Abe and his expectations, my mother and her coat and her broken, ravaged body, dead now, dust.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“as small and unimportant as I mostly felt, the egotism of youth hadn’t left me, and I placed myself firmly and squarely at the center of the universe.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“From the expression on his face, I could tell I’d hurt him in some soft, secret place, the same way he had hurt me. But it didn’t give me pleasure. All I felt was sad, as if this was all life was, an endless, interlocking chain of hurting people and being hurt in return.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year