Connie Brockway Quotes

Toffs?" Jack kept his eyes averted from his

And just what sort of gentlemen do you imagine now will be paying me court? ... I see ... In other words, social climbers who will not care that I am desperate or old men as desperate as I ... I refuse to marry a mushroom for the manure from which he's sprung. Nor shall I marry an old man to be his broodmare.

There are moments on stage when everything comes together. Then the kid in the front row coughs.

He wanted her. Her. Nothing could take that away from her. Ever. He wanted her, not the status he thought her purloined name could bring him

I find sarcasm before noon sours the stomach.

Charm is getting people to say "yes" without ever having to ask them a question.

Without remorse she gave good-bye to her fantasies. They'd served their purpose, they'd awoken her heart to its potential. But as far as using them as a template for her life ...

She was as unused to seeing tenderness in a man's eyes as she was to being caught off guard. Admiration? Amusement? Yes. Even desire. But those looks could be leveled at any inanimate object: a beautiful painting, a political cartoon, a French postcard. Tenderness was far more intimate, reserved for beings, not things.

Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius.

You are my country, Desdemona ... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.

I love you, Ginesse. Don't you see? You are my Zerzura. You are my undiscovered country, both my heart's destination and journey. Gold and temples, jewels and gems don't hold one bit of your enticement. You are my Solomon's mine, my uncharted empire. You are the only home I need to know, the only journey I want to take, the only treasure I would die to claim. You are exotic and familiar, opiate and tonic, hard conscience and sweet temptation. And now I have no more words to give you, Ginesse. I only have my heart, and you already own that.

If it's got a beard or a battery, you're going to have trouble with it.

I love you," she whispered, gazing up into his pale gray eyes.
He smiled crookedly, for a moment looking at her with a dazzled air. He had, she realized sadly, no experience hearing those words. He didn't know how to react. "I figured as much."
This time, she didn't hit him.

Ignorance is never better. I may not like what I learn, but I would rather know the truth than naively give credence to something that does not exist.

Who of us would have ended up where we are if someone hadn't had the good sense to interfere with us?

I want you cool and regal, earthy and impertinent, spoiling for a fight and abashed at your own temper. I want you flushed with exertion and rosy with sleep. I want you teasing and provocative, somber and thoughtful. I want every emotion, every mood, every year in a lifetime to come. I want you beside me, to encourage and argue with me, to help me and let me help you. I want to be your champion and lover, your mentor and student.

An intelligent lady, a little too mature for recklessness, a little too young for caution.

Give me a strong back, over a soft heart.

Mealy-mouthed. My mother would fillet any man who made such a ridiculous statement." Both men glanced at Lily who, having seen Kathy's son restored to her, had regained her seat, and was listening quietly. She lifted her dark eyes to her daughter's. "Quite right, Jenny," she said serenely with a smile at her husband.

Another suitor you failed to mention?" he asked, only half in jest.

Her eyes widened innocently, she started to shake her head - and froze.

"Look mister," Jim said tiredly. "I don't know who you are, and I don't care. You're too damn old for her-"

"Hi, Daddy.

Some days you're the cockroach, some days you're the boot heel.

No one ever fell in love gracefully.

At best she's a scrawny, hollow-eyed croneling." "Croneling?" John tilted his head in perplexity. "Croneling. Noun. One who has yet to achieve cronehood. The adolescent phase of the British crone," Avery lectured.

She felt abused, used, cherished, and pleasured.
She despised him. She loved him. She mistrusted him. She had complete faith in him. Ah!

She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, because the world never gave.
Or so she'd thought.

Madam, I could teach lessons in hell on the subject of 'want.'

He was Archie Grant, boon companion, should-be pirate, and suspected second-story man who could melt a girl with his smile but then would have no idea where the puddle at his feet had come from.

Foolish Lily," he said. "Don't you know why I haven't touched you? Didn't you guess that once you were in my arms I would never let you go?

How can you love me?" she asked, forcing herself to say the words that would kill the tenderness in his eyes. "You don't even know me. You know 'Lady Agatha,' a composite, a character, a role I played."

He shook his head, his negation gentle but certain. "I didn't fall in love with a character, a title, or an occupation. I didn't fall in love with you because of your past or despite it.
"I love you because of your intensity and passion, because you make me want to be better than I am, because seeing my reflection in your eyes makes me better than I am. I love you because you laugh easily and honestly. I love you because you carried an ugly mutt into a drawing room as though it were a prince and because you gave an old soldier a strawberry trifle. I love you, Letty.

The toughest role is real life.

Resist demonstrating that your worldliness was more fiction than fact," he whispered. "You, Lady Agatha, in the common parlance with which you are so fascinatingly familiar, 'ain't so tough.

"Do you know," his gaze speared her where she stood, "that since I have loved you, I have not regretted one word, one glance, one touch? And I am so certain in loving you, so sure of it, of us, that I cannot conceive that you regret any of these things, either."

He gave a humorless laugh. "Loving you has made me a monster of egotism, my dear. But there it is. I am fearless of misstep, unable to conceive that I could err so gravely that you would turn from me." His voice strained with his need to convince her. But she needed no convincing. She knew he loved her.

"I could never turn from you" she breathed.

They locked him in the stockade for four days. No other prisoners occupied the other cells that ran the length of the room. He was alone, and that was fine with him. He needed to think, and that was best done in a place where he wouldn't see Ginesse Braxton - Ginesse, not Mildred - because she did things to his thought processes, such as dammed them up completely.
She acted and he reacted: viscerally, irrepressibly, and ruinously.
She fell in the water; he dove in after her. She laughed; he smiled. She mentioned the beauty of the sunset; he saw colors in it he hadn't ever noticed. She peeked at him from under her gold-tipped lashes; he grew hard as Damascus steel. Pomfrey said something derogatory; he wanted to kill the sonofabitch with his bare hands.
Things like that.

Passion is tragedy-in-waiting

Where will you go? What will you do?" he demanded.
"That need be no concern of yours
"
"The hell it isn't!" he shouted. "Everything about you is my concern."
She opened her mouth to deny this but the look of him stopped her. For a long tense moment he studied her and when he spoke his voice was low and furious and yearning.
"I don't give a bloody damn if I never share your bed, your name, or your house
you are still my concern. You can leave, take yourself from my ken, disappear for the rest of my life but you cannot untangle yourself from my
my concern. That I have of you, Miss Bede, for that, at least, I do not need your permission."
His words shocked her. She looked decades hence and she saw a specter of what might have been haunting her every moment, her every act, for the rest of her life.
"Your concern is misplaced."
"It's mine to misplace," he said steadily.

I've thought of a reason," Kit MacNeill said

He loved but he did not know how to be loved.

He stopped. She heard the intake of his breath. "You are my country, Desdemona." Yearning, harsh and poignant and she felt herself swaying toward him. "My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining."
She gasped.
His gaze fell, shielded by his lashes. An odd, half-mocking smile played about his lips. "You'll never hear old Blake say something like that."
She swallowed, unable to speak, her senses abraded by his stimulating words, her pulse hammering in anticipation? Trepidation?
"Remember my words next time he calls you a bloody English rose.

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

This is all very interesting," Briarly said. "But, perhaps you can reacquaint yourself with Miss Peyton at a more appropriate time, Captain Oakes. Though you may be my sister's guest, here you are very much de trop."
"Am I?" Neill asked. "Allow me to rectify the situation." He turned to Kate. "I believe I saw you limping just now."
She blinked in confusion. She wasn't limping-Before she knew what he was about, he'd taken hold of her hand, pulled her forward, and was scooping her up into his arms as neatly and carelessly as a laundress collects bedding.

Conscience is like a pet: If you spoil it by too much attention it'll start yipping at the most inopportune times.

War does not ask which of its victims deserves to die and which does not. It is indiscriminate. Innocent as well as guilty fall before it.

Anyway, as I was saying, I don't know about you, Granddad, but I come from a long line of" - her gaze flicked through the open door into the room behind - "fishermen, who taught me that whilst I wasn't ever to think I was better than anyone else, I should always keep in mind that I was just as good.