Regina O'Melveny Quotes

I felt that I was burning underwater.

The recitation of grievances was strange balm.

She'd always perceived the world to be against her. Happiness was never to be trusted. And yet I thought vaguely, neither was sorrow. Didn't each come to season in the other?

It was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine.

I've since come to believe that the world is populated by multitudes of women sitting at windows, inseparable from their surroundings. I myself spent many hours at a window on the Zattere, waiting for my father's return, waiting for my life to appear like one of those great ships that came into the harbor, broad sails filled with the wind of providence ... I'd grown transparent as the glass through which I peered, dangerously invisible even to myself. It was then I knew I must set my life in motion or I would disappear.

The impetuous wind can ignite the fire or put it out.

One must stand apart in order to truly know another.

Beauty comes to us more readily on a full belly.