1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7538
7539
7540
7541
7542
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f886bd4 | When someone dies without ever having experienced the joy of it, never really had someone love them in their heart, it leaves...well an ache, an echo if you will. It's a void of regret and sadness that doesn't die with them. Because of that, they can't cross over. They would never be truly happy in heaven. They would be waiting forever for someone who would never come, because no one would die who ever adored them. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 451f918 | It was wonderful strolling hand-in-hand in an unfamiliar city, in a country that wasn't ours. Even if that city was Sydney. It lent us a special kind of privacy only those who have travelled understand. You are anonymous. A voyeur. It grants a certain freedom, and presents possibilities one would not imagine among those with whom they are tethered to by birth and nationality. It is like being in costume at a masquerade ball where no one wil.. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| ddd1c85 | but what the mind understands and what the heart believes are not always in sync. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 495e257 | I pulled out some folded-over pictures of US Presidents. I knew how to talk to bellboys. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 5eda0e1 | Even if we ran into Charlie Chan he'd only smile and give us some proverb. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 30c5886 | She ran her finger along the smooth book cover affectionately, finding comfort in the beautiful words she knew were within. She was privy to love's secrets, and its depth and breadth in a way so few in this life could fathom. She knew these things because she was truly alone in the world, and only those forced to live without love completely understood that a life without love is a life not truly lived. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 479e166 | We lived --or rather had lived --in a society which had come to view the father as almost superfluous. But people of common sense knew better. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| f4e227b | As Jones was leaving, he turned back and commented, "Maybe now you won't write the cops so dumb on your next show." He winked as he shut the door, having the last word after saving our skins." | Bobby Underwood | ||
| fb6e969 | When she smiled she got these wonderful little crinkles at the corners of her mouth, and there were faint traces of lines at the corners of her pretty eyes. They were beauty lines, the kind a woman starts to get when there's more to her than just being a girl. She made me think of the French Riviera, even though I'd never been to the French Riviera. At the edge of her laughter I could almost hear Mancini's Latin Snowfall playing. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 8f5f3a0 | Mary was stretched out on the lounge by the pool reading Agatha Christie's new book, Dumb Witness, which a friend had sent her from England. I was reading Erich Maria Remarque's sadly beautiful, Three Comrades. MGM had purchased it and were making a film adaptation starring Margaret Sullavan, who I happened to adore. We'd be here all week so I'd also brought Erle Stanley Gardner's new Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Dangerous Dowager. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| b6ab9df | A doll! I smiled. Maybe someone else would have thought him crude, but I saw beneath his rough exterior. He was sweet. And he'd called me a doll, like in the pulp magazines. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 651b0e6 | What I remembered best, however, was a darkly sensual Ecuadorian girl as tender, hungry and insatiable as any I'd ever encountered. She was engaged to one of the Ecuadorian airport personnel but from the moment our eyes met as she lay in a hammock at a barbecue thrown to help everyone get acquainted, we knew we were going to be lovers. Even though her boyfriend was there that day, we found a way to get close. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 8a9be3b | Perhaps I was in that season of winter in which all writers experience at some point. Did I still believe or didn't I? I had once, long ago. But years pass, seasons change, and hope and faith sometimes drift about in a chilly wind when love is something that only happens to other people. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 1e570ba | It was the question I kept coming back to, the one I couldn't answer. I had begun to believe again in the miracles about which I wrote, but now that faith had been shaken. Was God asking if I still believed? | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 3bdc371 | The late afternoon sky over Paris imparted a softer glow to the city, hinting in a lover's whisper to be patient with her, because the romantic heaven of Paris by night was only a few hours away, and would be worth the wait. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 7fe0f0c | I didn't see how it could be anything bad, because that wasn't the way God worked, or at least the way I'd always believed he worked. I had gotten something back today that I'd all but lost, and by the time I'd wound my way to the farmhouse, I'd decided to hang onto it as tight as I could. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 5f93b5a | I couldn't think of any reason except the truth, which would only make him yell, or worse, laugh at me. It was humiliating, because he was right. It was silly, after all, losing myself in some pulp romance. Life wasn't like that, not really. It was just that I needed a small break from my life sometimes. But how could I tell Robert that, and hurt his feelings? | Bobby Underwood | ||
| fc00723 | I wasn't among the fortunate to have seen sexy Brigitte Bardot sunbathing topless along Spain's magnificent Costa del Sol way back when, but I could not imagine it being more breathtakingly impactful on a man than was my first glimpse of Alisha Fontaine. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| f52ee89 | My first night across the border I stopped at a ramshackle cantina that had a warped bar counter and dirt floor, like in the old west, and bought a drink for a tiny but curvy little Mexican girl named Calida. She had a cherub-like face that belonged in a cradle but a body that suggested nothing less than a grown man could pacify her now. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 3efbf6c | It did rain again, of course, but never the same strange rain as that night. I slept scant hours each night, and then only from utter exhaustion. I fought sleep, because it was my enemy. I knew I would never forgive myself if the moment I nodded off turned out to be the precise moment the special rain began falling. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| 9f803eb | That's why I envy Justin here in no small way. Despite her unfortunate room, and all those milkmaids threatening to swallow her with their smiles ... she can start her life over and be anything she chooses to be. Nobody knows what she was like back in Fredericksburg. She has lost all the props that defined her. Nobody knows all the peculiarities and character traits of her forebears so they can pretend to recognize those traits in her. She'.. | Gail Godwin | ||
| b8a7345 | home. Recognizing him, she said this before he | Ruth Rendell | ||
| 4204171 | I knew Laura wasn't home this morning, so there was no possibility of her hearing the shot and rushing over to help, placing herself in mortal danger. Which she would have gladly done, because that's who she was in real life, as well as on television; though her popular show was no longer on the air, her legions of fans adored her, and continued to watch her show in syndication. Like Laura, they believed in decency, the hereafter, hope and .. | Bobby Underwood | ||
| a92de53 | the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 3436338 | General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 7c27090 | She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, "I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control her days." | Gail Godwin | ||
| be4df5b | If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, "I am truly sorry," would that mean as much to you as "the burden of it has been intolerable to me"? Remorse" | Gail Godwin | ||
| 3b59831 | After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 418b440 | But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You're going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You're not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before. | Gail Godwin | ||
| a9140f0 | All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough. | Gail Godwin | ||
| b4452a4 | Maybe it's because I'm more confident of my own powers now, not so afraid of losing myself, of being molded by other people's needs of me, of being overwhelmed by them, that I can live in those strange, green days again and willingly be that girl. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 511a557 | As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished. | Gail Godwin | ||
| d03ee3c | Other people don't exist when you're not with them. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 8e1a265 | As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. ("I write with a big black crayon," he would write to me later, "while you're more of an impressionist. I don't think you have it in you to be crude.") In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funni.. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 64ab1ec | Squashed behind The Cloud of Unknowing we discovered a pocket-size spiral notebook with a day-by-day account of the time Justin had stayed with her and her husband after Tommy's death. The writing was legible though it required effort (this was before she took her calligraphy course), but Justin was ecstatic and asked if he could have the little notebook. "This is my history," he said. Later, after he had deciphered every last word: "Boy, w.. | personal writing | Gail Godwin | |
| c150941 | One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries. | Gail Godwin | ||
| cd3939c | Discontent," Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, "may be God's catapult, His way of saying: 'Go and try yourself now." | Gail Godwin | ||
| 7366756 | People commit thousands of small suicides every day that go unnoticed | Gail Godwin | ||
| b56f00a | What is memory but another narrative form? | Gail Godwin | ||
| 70d25e2 | May their having each other make more of them both. | partnerships | Gail Godwin | |
| 63bbb6c | The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can-- in present time-- and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 391611d | During all my worrying about how and when and whether we'd ever get together again, I had neglected to imagine we might slip back together as naturally as a dislocated joint slipping back into place, followed by an ardor more straightforward than either of us had been capable of before. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 1fcbfdc | When someone has enough money, logistics can be worked out in no time. | wealth | Gail Godwin | |
| c10169d | How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase 'make us grow' slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places. | Gail Godwin |