Anne Rivers Siddons Quotes

You never, never ask a young man to take you anywhere, Molly. It's cheap. It sounds desperate. It sounds like you can't get a date any other way. With your height and those big breasts, you're always going to have to be careful not to look desperate. A real beauty can get away with it, maybe, but the rest of us ordinary girls have to be very, very careful not to look desperate.

The very old can tell you about peace. They have fought through the black, sinking, visceral knowledge of death–their own death–that heralds middle age and come to the place where childhood meets them once more, and with it that ineffable treasure that only the very young and old know: the tranquility of the moment. The contentment of living each day as it comes to them, wholly and with all senses. The young do it because they know nothing, yet, of pain and fear and the transience of their lives; the old because they know everything of those things and can bear them only by staying in the moment. Carpe diem> may be the sum of all the world's wisdom. I have always thought Horace must have been old when he wrote it.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

Peter and I danced in bare feet in the cold wet undergrowth while the moon poured its wild old silver down on us and the water ran black and ancient and the moss shone.

Everything about it and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep buried wildness in my heart.

At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long.

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was ... young.

Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky...

I fell in love with Peter at that precise instant. I don't suppose many other women know the exact moment the rest of their lives began.

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.

It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.

To sputter and giggle - Baby too. "I followed my piss!" I said between hiccupping laughter. "She followed her piss and her dreams came true!" Rachel screamed. "Follow your piss, Obi-Wan Kenobi," Barbara intoned.

...heavy satin that fell like spilled syrup...

Life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom.

The sunset over the bay that evening was a conflagration of blood-red and orange and deep, gold-edged purple. I remember: unforgettable.

Yancey crawled from her tangled bed one morning and assembled her long limbs and sharp bones into something as exotic and seductive to the eye as a peacock or a griffin or a unicorn.

Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia.

I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

Bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.

I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mo

Anger is its own excuse and its own reward ...

All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait.
Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.

Be careful who you love. They'll be part of you always. Even after the love is long dead, the fuckers'll be part of you.

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness ...

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest.

The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.

And I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper.

Her light brown eyes were the color of sherry, fringed with long, thick, gold-tipped lashes.

(the villa) It's beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white.

Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur ... It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most ... timeless.

But there sometimes comes a moment, a small, silent white explosion of awareness.

A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely.

Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.

I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way.

Against the grape-flushed sky perfect amethyst night.

You will have to grow up to her quickly, I thought, surprising myself, or you will lose her.

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.