Nancy Horan Quotes

[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky
'the hem of heaven.

Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.

Are they sleeping now?" the boy

There's not a word I can say to you that you have not already though of, Mamah... There are ways to hold the thing up in the light and see a hundred facets, and knowing you, you've found a hundred and one.

There's a phrase over the door; she called to him. "Haec est porta coeli." ... "Here is the gate to heaven.

But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was.

She got up from the bed, knelt beside the bed, and put her forehead down on the covers. She was not practiced at prayer anymore. The only word that came to mind was "please".

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

'Loving Frank' is about a forbidden love affair between two people who lived a hundred years ago - Frank Lloyd Wright and his married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The affair set off a colossal newspaper scandal when the lovers ran off to Europe together.

Is it every former madwoman's worst nightmare to be thought crazy when she isn't?

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.

Take my love for granted," he said, "and I shall do the same for you.

It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn't look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.

How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.

What a morning," Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. "I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again.

My mother is my father's wife. And the children of lovers are orphans.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

You've known her for how long, a day and a half? Must you always fall so hard? Can't you just play?

A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.

Mamah saw clearly now just what she had lost. She had given up her right to keep her place as the children's most beloved. The small, daily offices of love that had connected her to the children before - the shoe tying, the hair combing, the nightly storytelling - were no longer hers to claim. How dare she seek from them the comfort that had once so nourished her? To keep them yearning for a mother who was rarely with them, through her own choice, would be to sentence them to whole lifetimes of sorrow.

He loved his wife, though love seemed an inadequate word to contain all the emotion that passed between married people.

What good is a man if he will not defend the honor of the woman he loves? And

We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.

I wish a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free. That

That kind of work ultimately didn't satisfy her deeper creative impulses, and it didn't fetch any glory in Louis's circle.

look into possibly hiring a boat of some sort when I

I'm married to Kevin, a photographer whose career has put him on the campaign trail with presidential candidates and sent him on assignment to far-flung places for long periods of time. It was sometimes rough when our children were small, and I was beginning to write in earnest.

She had found more than peace of mind. She had discovered the state of her soul set down in ink.

Fanny believed their emotional landscapes were similar: Both were tenderhearted, headstrong, tough and vulnerable all at once.

I don't buy junk. When I buy something, it's got to be perfection or I don't want it. You won't find me coming home with five cheap suits, one for each day of the week. I'd rather have one perfect suit or none.

When both lovers yearn to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection, this is the highest form of love possible between a man and a woman ... To experience such love is to feel oneself doubled. Such feeling liberates and deepens the personality, inspires us to noble deeds and works of genius.

The steadiness of your friendship warms me in this cold place. As

Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars.

Stay the course, daughter. But show yourself some kindness along the way.

To fare on - fusing the self that wakes and the self that dreams.