Sylvia Brownrigg Quotes

He did not know what it was like to be two women in love.

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

I'd like to pay your palms the same favor that you pay these pages, searching them for grooves and images and the secret signs of hunger, as you may scan these words for hidden messages. The lines of your hand might be a guide to your gifts for pleasure, or a clue to where you'll take me, or a map of where I might take you.

Such nights are possible, and we survive them. It is a matter of sleeping next to the adored body you no longer have the right or inclination to love. Whether you are the one who casts off, or are the cast of yourself; whether your arms are the recoilers, or the ones that reach wantingly, then pull back, remembering they are no longer wanted. Two bodies that are used to each other's rhythms and sleep sounds, that know the turnings and breathings, know not to worry about that cough or that brief garbled grunt, that wildly flung arm or that stone-cold foot. Bodies that soon will not know each other's night selves: will touch each other through jackets and jeans and the cooled-down air of reestablished acquaintance, if such a thing is possible between a given pair of ex-lovers.

I was busy falling in love at first sight. So I had to stare. That's what you do when you're falling in love at first sight. You go into soft focus, and romantic music starts playing in the background.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

People are cruel, and they will do anything.

This was another item about growing up: you encountered all the cliches of love and loss and heartbreak.

Those who are apparently absent can feel more present than the people right in front of you.

It could not always be love in the afternoon and passion in the night, gifts given, notes written, meals fed to each other. It can't all be like that.

He wants me back." The closing punctuation of "obviously" hung in the air. The confidence in her! Anne would always have it: the certainty that there would be a trail of people following her, wanting her love and her beauty. Flannery saw that confidence, and through the polluted air now between them it no longer charmed her. Not tonight it didn't. Flannery was not inclined to be one of that number.

Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn't just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health.

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.

Flannery never forgot this. Anne Arden, a woman who meant more to Flannery than Flannery felt she could ever have meant to Anne, had found the person she was intended for; so Flannery need not be bitter, and never was. Anne loved Jasper, and was loved. What more could you want for someone who mattered to you?

:fondle a plump plastic-wrapped volume, crack it's often-cracked back and spread open the pages. Swallow what's in there, whatever it is. Devour the words.