Yearly Quotes (page 85)
When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.
Frederick Buechner
Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the...
Virginia Woolf
I saw our golden years on a black gale, our time of love spilt in the furious dust."O we are winter-caught, and we must fail,"said the dark dream, "and time is overcast."-And woke into the night; but you were there, and small as seed in the wild dark we lay. Small as seed under the gulfs of airis set the stubborn heart that waits for day. I saw our love the root that holds the vinein the enduring earth, that can reply,"Nothing shall die unless for me it die. Murder and hate and love alike are...
Judith Wright
What a madly gay little wine, my dear!" M. Cliquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain. "One would say a Tavel of a good year," I cried, "if one were a complete bloody fool." I did not say the second clause aloud.My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.
A. J. Liebling
Someday you'll remember what I said and you'll thank me for it."Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down. She figured she'd have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them.
Betty Smith
She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell’s Modern Europe sometime last summer.
John Cheever
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order
Thomas Hardy