Monica Wood Quotes

I read with a kind of curious terror, learning that words can pin their readers to place, confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.

You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people - . . . They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan. . . .

There is no such thing as wasted writing.

Gradually, the darkness sculpted itself into air and object, the appointments of her room materializing as smoky shapes: a skyline of perfume bottles on her dresser...

He had not loved his son enough. This knowledge lived like a malignancy on his heart.

Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple's long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for still competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.
Maybe it was the work.

Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn't convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn't you, you little dickens?

A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.

A single task won't crush your spirit. Give yourself a break

But here's the thing Ona. Howard wrote that song for you.' Quinn had never been more sure of anything. 'I think he wrote all his songs for you, Ona, for young and lovely you.'
'Now you're talking foolish.'
'He wrote them for you, and you refused them because he didn't know how to give them to you.' How could he, living his shadow of a life, floundering in the sludge of grief and failure?
'Have you been drinking?'
'Listen to me,' he said. 'You 're the glittering girl with the cherry-wood hair. You're the angel's breath and sunlight.'
'Oh, for heaven's sake.' She sat up crossly, her tufted hair seeming to quiver. 'Quinn Porter,' she said, 'I never took you for a romantic.'
'Howard Stanhope loved you,' he declared. 'I thought you should know.'
'Well, all right.'
'I thought you should know, Ona.'
'Thank you.'
'People should know these things

His cheeks were all pinked up. Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road.

...imagining her name in a record book. All those demure round letters in the first name, followed by the stalky surprise of the surname. Ona Vitkus.

...each chime pecking a pinhole in the sheeted dark until the last layers shred completely and the light pours in and in.

They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.

I have always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for their characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction.

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning.