Frances learns something in this moment that will allow her to survive and function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing can look like another. That the facts of a situation don't ne...
Who is that in the glass? She sees herself for the first time. She doesn't require softlight, not at her age, not with her looks, so the effect of three candles is excessivelyravishing. Her hair spark...
Under a smoky streetlamp I stood face to face with my beloved and pricked my fingers against the diamond studs of her immaculate shirt front. Being tall, she slipped her hands naturally about my hips...
She ran right into his arms and he swung heraround like a little kid, laughing, and then they hugged. He thought his heart wouldkill him, he'd had no clue what it was capable of.
Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
Here is the place called Awake. On the other side of this line is the country of Asleep. And you see this shaded area in between? Don't linger there. It is No Man's Land.
By fall, they can read. It happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy's lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, their comes...
All memories soften with age, and the good ones are also the most perishable (...) conjured up till they faded to nothing. Like cave paintings by candlelight, she could only glimpse them now in the da...
The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear we should not judge. We should just say, poor Camille, she turned into a bitch the way most people w...
She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that crestfallen feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate m...
Ignore them. Don't give them the opportunity to snub you. Carry yourself like you own the place.
Good women discuss these things the way epidemiologists identify and track disease without alarming the public. This is woman’s work. Men are unfitted for it by nature and should be protected from it...
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been u...
Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?
Corruption hangs in the air around a great talent. Such a gift is unstable by nature, apt to embarrass its handlers. About her there is the whiff of the entertainer. Like vaudeville nipping the heels...
Books were not an expense; they were an investment.
An unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook.
Adelaide believes that all children should have enough grown-ups around who love them so that one can tell them to fight, one can tell them not to, and one can tell them not to worry so much.
Who's the Devil?Frances crouches down as if she were talking to Trixie. That's something I'll never tell you, Lily, no matter how old you get to be, because the Devil is shy. It makes him angry when s...
It’s a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak.