Beatriz Williams Quotes

You're greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It's not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. you want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you wat to think you're different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you.

She zipped her lips.

I feel silly. You can pull it off, but I can't."

Isobel pulled back, took my shoulders, and angled me back and forth for examination. A smile grew on her mouth. "You're wrong, my precious. You can pull off anything if you just stop trying.

Maybe the fault is with the race, not the horse.

Your father owns a history company?" I say teasingly.

Nick laughs. "No. Everyone on Wall Street has a history degree, though you'd never know it, the way they keep making the same mistakes, crash after crash.

compunction, and her cigarette dangles from her scarlet-tipped hand. She hasn't

I didn't reply I didn't think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you're overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.

And there it was, a snap in his chest, the audible noise of his best intentions cracking in half and cracking again, a chain reaction of thick cracks causing hairline cracks, causing the whole goddamned works, the whole vast machinery of his human willpower, to crumble downward into his abdominal cavity, where it lay pretty much useless.

You have a softa?' 'Somewhere underneath all these boxes.' 'These boxes you won't unpack.' 'I will now.' Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling. I will now. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too.

I was not falling in love; I was certainly not falling in love. Love was a fiction, written by Nature to disguise her real purpose. This sick, breathless sensation in my belly was only biology. This heat on my nerves. Only the instinct to procreate. Or something else, maybe. The recognition of imminent danger.

Listen to me, Violet. I want more than this. I want to lie next to you at night and worship you. I want to watch you by day and see what you're capable of, you astonishing woman, you bloody beautiful thing. I want to count every scintillation of you.

Is this different? Does love make lovemaking better? Does Nick feel this holy consummation, this wonder and beauty, this eternity, the way I do? Or is sex simply like this, designed by Nature to fool us all into multiplying?

I think I've done a reasonable job of conforming to the conventions of this world. I've made adjustments, I've modernized, I've adapted. But one thing I refuse to concede is my right to punch the lights out of any man who dares to insult you. Not because you're helpless; God knows you're not. But because no man can stand by idly and see his idol defamed.

one can no longer distinguish between history and reality after the absinthe goes in the punch.

What about the look in your eyes?' 'God knows. I was just trying to make you better.' 'Well, you did that. You've always done that. Now, go to bed. I don't dare help you. It's all I can do right now, just looking at you, falling out of my dressing gown like that.

I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I'm gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry's coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry's going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman.

I am inside your skin, he whispered. I am reading your thoughts. What am I thinking? That you have fallen in love with me all over again. That you love my scars and my sinful habits, and my loyal heart that beats for you. That you want me to make another baby inside you, so there is no chance God will put us asunder again.

This was what she couldn't get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry's grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if this house and this world had been built by God's hands for their love alone.

What would that be like, not to give a damn what the other women think?

Besides, it seems to me, since my pleasure is more or less a foregone conclusion, the main object of the exercise ought to be your pleasure. A rather elusive creature, I've heard. Fascinating sort of quarry.' 'Wait a minute. You're hunting down my orgasms?' His laughter burst out like a rifle salute. 'Kate. You damned magnificent creature.' He rolled onto his back, bringing me with him. 'Yes, my darling. That's exactly what I'd like to do, on and on until the end of my life.

I wish you all the happiness in the world, Frau Grant. I hope our paths meet again.

I can't bring myself to open my eyes. I am an ember, glowing from the inside out. The dark and silent room keeps everything else at bay, every sensation, except the two of us, Nick and Lily, who have just made love.

The word accountant turned a switch in people's brains, so that anything else you said just made a garbled Blah bla-bla-blah in the air, like Charlie Brown's teacher.

Well, that's the thing about choices, isn't it? There are always more to make. I've never seen a street where you couldn't cross to the other side.

A clean break, like an amputation. Eventually, you realized you could survive without all your limbs, that you could function and even thrive, because human beings were designed to take a battering. And though you weren't whole, you at least had a son. And though it sometimes seemed as if your heart had stopped beating, you at least knew that somewhere in the world, another heart was beating for you.

It's better that way, don't you think? You're prepared to like anything when you're comfortable sauced.

This is the switching point, Caspian,' she whispered in his shirt. 'This is me, switching tracks.' 'I guess that's one thing to call it. A new one on me. We could start a new slang. Let's go back to my place and switch tracks.

...I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it's gone. You can't have it back. And it's only a second! Isn't that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your lifelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life--your real, murky, messy, incalculable life--your life resumes.

Because nothing hurts more than that, nothing ever hurts you more than the people you love.

She's not beautiful not really only very good at looking beautiful.

I knew exactly where he existed in my heart; I had no idea where he existed in the universe.

How terrible a time is the beginning of March. In a month there will be daffodils and the sudden blossoming of orchards, but you wouldn't know it now. You have to take spring on blind faith.

One can follow the sun, of course, but I have always thought that it is best to know some winter, too, so that the summer, when it arrives, is the more gratefully received.

Funny thing, falling in love. You can't quite explain the difference between this--kissing the girl you love, having sex with the girl you love--and all the kissing and all the sex that came before. You can't describe the difference between her flesh and that flesh, her hips and their hips, her gasp and those gasps. You can't parse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experience, the units that make up the whole, any more than you, the untrained viewer, can explain why the Mona Lisa is the Mona fucking Lisa. You just stand back and take it in and say, Wow, so this is art. You lie back in your bed, you hold her next to your chest, her ribs next to your ribs, her breath and your breath, and you say, So this is love.

...my fingers were trembling as I pressed the number eleven on the elevator panel; my heart was smashing violently against my ribs with the consciousness of reckless guilt. Or rather, the consciousness of an absence of guilt: that I didn't care, didn't give a damn. That it was my turn to break things, to hurt someone irreparably.

What makes you Vivian.' I liked the way he said my name, all throaty on the V's, all stretched to its rightful three syllables.

Jazz, Miss Lily, is the bastard child of music, born from the old Negro work song by a whole lot of fine daddies who ain't about to claim it.

Didn't It belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who have lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul.

(He remembered resting against her afterward, listening to the beat of her heart, taking her breath into his lungs, and thinking that he was the luckiest man in the world, that you couldn't connect with a human being any more perfectly than that. And sure enough, he'd been right.)

Now's your chance, Lily. Remember to ask him about himself. They love that. And for God's sake don't talk about books.

I had learned that you could imagine anything you wanted, that the space inside your head belonged only to you. Furnished and decorated and inhabited only by you, so that your insides teemed and seethed while your outward aspect remained serene.

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.

I must confess, it puzzles me. You Americans went to such trouble to rid yourself of our quaint little monarchy."
"Oh we like to gossip about them, all right. Just not to let them rule over us and all that.

My mother once told me that a lifetime of good enough was a fair price to pay for a single moment of pure happiness. This is my moment. Don't take that away from me.

Life is complicated, without any sort of road map. We are bound to have disappointments and setbacks, and with each one we make the choice to reinvent ourselves as a stronger version of who we are.

There's something about the smells of your childhood, isn't there? ... You still remember those small sublime joys with an ache of longing because there's no getting it back, is there? You cannot return to a state of innocence.

The floorboards creaked as he stepped toward her. She counted each one, because they belonged to Harry, because the floorboards were so lucky to bear the touch of Harry's feet.

I don't know how [books] accumulate like that. They're part rabbit, I think.

I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel.

I thought, how magical, the first glimspe of snow. By March I would be sick of it, but here in this November instant those tiny flakes swirled with the unspeakable purity of a divine gift.

...she wears a summer nightgown, white cotton trimmed with a token bit of lace at the neck and sleeves. She dislikes the itchiness of the lace against her skin, the sense of delicate entrapment.

You don't have a civilized self.' 'Yes, I do. Look at me now, quite calm and under control, while you stand right there, a few feet away from me, and the light glows against your skin. Turning you to gold. I don't think there's any higher proof of the power of civilization, that I'm not kissing you senseless.

Love isn't a mistake. But I know true love is rare enough that when you find it you fight for it. Marry me, Kate. Come back to Charleston with me and be with me for the rest of our lives.

She loved too much. She staked everything on people she loved. When they were gone, it destroyed her.

All men are brutes.

To Florida -- its dreamers, its builders, its mavericks, and its scoundrels. (Sometimes all four at.)

Two o'clock in the morning with a newborn is the loneliest hour in the world.