Therese Anne Fowler Quotes

No longer did I imagine that any place we lived would become permanent. The only question was how long we'd stay.

This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await.

He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you.

He believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do. - Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?"
The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap.
"Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that.

We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one's softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately.

I've come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

Tree's are life. Not just my life", she would add, since her fields were forests and ecology, "but life period. They literally make oxygen. We need to keep at least seven trees for every human the planet, or else people are going to start suffocating. Think of that.

If only. Were there sadder words than these?

His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek's rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.

There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?

It was easy enough to tell: if I wasn't writing, I didn't exist.

Adventure:' there's a word that worked on us both like a charm.

Yet she understood a truth she could never say aloud: this ideal life was still deficient. She was not wholly content. Perhaps she should be, but contentment, she had learned, lay beyond money's considerable reach.

It's in the telling of a tragedy that we sow the seeds --we hope -- of prevention of future sorrows.

While I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.

What story will our kids be telling about us someday, do you suppose?" "It'll be a lot more romantic than two senators matchmaking," I said. "They'll say that we were meant to be together no matter what. For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled - prob'ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven't heard about it yet." "A Homeric epic, it sounds like. Have another glass of champagne and tell me more." *

-no, I was a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I'd ever been before.

I'm Alabama-born, so a transplant here - but I think I could enjoy growing some roots.

Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman - for all humans, in fact - comes when one discovers and then achieves one's ultimate purpose.

This is what we've got at the moment, who we are. It's not nearly what we once had- the good, I mean- but it's also not what we once had, meaning the bad.

Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.

When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.

Why couldn't we see one another as simply human and pull together, for goodness' sake? The planet was dying while people fought over things like who was most American-or who was American at all.

A man deserves credit when he accomplishes something of importance. Something that provides for the betterment of his life and his family's life and, whenever possible, mankind.

Consider: The mouth is the only bit of erotic landscape visible when a woman is dressed. It is the symbol of every moist cavern a woman possesses, which all men are bound to seek out, we have no choice.

There's nothing like losing yourself in someone else's troubles to make you forget your own.

In my experience, there were two kinds of men. One type - no matter how plain or how poor he might be - is always willing to at least try his luck with an attractive girl. The other type looks upon all of those first types with envy.

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.

Exhaustion's not an excuse, its a reason

I could focus again on why we'd all come here in the first place. I could focus on Scott. How handsome and distinguished he looked in his dark gray suit, a finer cut than I'd seen him in before. He looked like the man he said he was going to be, and I thought, I will never doubt him again.

Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.

I'd already sensed the attraction between us. it was apparent from the first time we met. But that sort of attraction was so usual that it didn't rate serious attention, let alone concern. When the attraction turned into something that smelled and tasted like substance, though, that was when things got complicated.

A married woman will first deny to herself that anything improper is going on. She'll make excuses for her eagerness to see the man in question. She likes his sharp mind, for example, or his fresh views, or the stories he tells about his experiences, which are so different from her own. She'll dismiss as mere amusement her mind's tendency to wonder where he is and what he's doing, and whether he's thinking of her. She might even avoid the fellow for a day or two to test herself. If she doesn't see him and she feels fine about that, she'll know there's no cause for concern. The test is fake, though, too, because she's lying to herself to make sure she passes the test, which will then justify her choice to see him again, often.

You - and I'll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays - fancies himself a poet, when all you're doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page.

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds
and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.