How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Sarah is the most enthusiastic cynical person on the planet. She'd be the perfect cheerleader if she wasn't so disgusted by school spirit. She's a literature fanatic like me, but reads darker, read Sartre in tenth grade—Nausea—which is when she started wearing black (even at the beach), smoking cigarettes (even thought she looks like the healthiest girl you've ever seen), and obsessing about her existential crisis (even as she partied into all hours of the night). (2.25)
Sartre's book, Nausea, focuses on the idea that "existence precedes essence." In other words, everyone starts out a blank slate and creates who they are by their actions alone. This might explain Sarah's contradictive personality—why shouldn't she both wear black and go to the beach all the time? She's in charge of who she is.
Quote #2
"I don't know if in your mature age you can understand this, Len, but this is the way it is: When men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don't stay around long enough to know if they've fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it's more complicated, it's just different." (10.6)
Gram has decided not to view her daughter's disappearance as the sign of something wrong with her. Instead, she's pointed out that if her daughter were a man, it would be more socially acceptable for her to disappear. This tells us a bit about the way she's tried to make sense of Paige's abandonment—she avoids labels like "crazy" or "damaged" in favor of a more complicated story.
Quote #3
She's lying on a rock in the sun reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex—in preparation, I'm sure, for her very promising guy-poaching expedition to State Women's Studies Department feminism symposium. (20.3)
The Second Sex is known as one of the early texts on feminist theory. That's a lot of homework to do in order to supposedly meet guys.
Quote #4
This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way—profoundly. You'd think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven't. I've never once though about the interpretive, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever. (26.45)
Wow, this is a pretty big moment for Lennie. She's learned to view her life in a completely new way. She can make the choice to think of her mother as a very sick woman, or she can think of her as a restless adventurer.
Quote #5
She hops on the stool across the counter from where I'm working, throws her book on the counter. It's by a Hélène Cixous. "Lennie, these French feminists are so much cooler than those stupid existentialists. I'm so into this concept of jouissance, it means transcendent rapture, which I'm sure you and Joe know all about—" (27.43)
Hélène Cixous believed that jouissance (which involves, among other things, sexual pleasure) is the source of a woman's creative power, and suppressing it would actually block empowerment.
Quote #6
"[…] These feminists are all about celebrating the body, is language." She whips the scarf in the air. "Like I said, they're all after jouissance. As a means, of course, of subverting he dominant patriarchal paradigm and the white male literary canon, but we can get into that another time." (27.77)
Sarah might be right about the French feminists approving of her idea to make Lennie seduce Joe. They were pretty pro-sexuality.
Quote #7
And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap. (28.43)
Poor Lennie—this moment reminds her that she can't take the whole I am the author of my own story thing too far. She can't use it as an excuse to justify any action. Because at any moment, according to her philosophy, other authors of their own stories can judge her any way they want.
Quote #8
"Yes, maybe some doctor could give it a name, a diagnosis, but what difference does it make what we call it, it still is what it is, we call it the restless gene, so what? It's as true as anything else." (33.13)
Looks like Gram also subscribes to Uncle Big's theory that she can choose to interpret life the way she wants to. And she's taking that idea a step further, too, in pointing out that there is no single truth. According to Gram, there are lots of truths.
Quote #9
Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messistentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess. (33.41)
Life as a whole bunch of stories, huh? With no one truth? What do you think? Do you agree with Lennie?
Quote #10
What do you do now?
It's hard to explain—it's like swimming, but not in water, in light.
Who do you swim with?
Mostly you and Toby, Gram, Big, with Mom too, sometimes. (38.1)
Remember how Lennie's started thinking about herself as the author of her own story? Well, it looks like she's chosen what to believe Bailey is doing in the afterlife: She's chosen to believe that Bailey is with her.