Vivian Quotes

It was as though she existed outside of time. She didn't give a shit about being cool which I came to appreciate as very cool. "What ~ Vivian McInerny

This is car theft. This is running away. This is some punk-rock New Orphans shit. This is not like any Vivian Apple I have ever been before. But this is Vivian Apple at the end of the world. ~ Katie Coyle

Hey, Lily," Todd says, placing a napkin in front of her. "Do you know what you're in the mood for tonight? ~ Vivian Winslow

This is what I think, but I don't say the words because the counterpoint of yes and no, love and hate, fear and longing, the need to tear down and the need to build up are synonymous and one. ~ Robert Vivian

NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time. ~ Vivian Swift

I had heard the same carols all my life, seen the same little play, with the same mistakes in grammar. The minister had offered the same prayer as always, Christmas or Sunday. The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again. Vivian said things were changing. But where were they changing? ~ Ernest J. Gaines

What do you think, Vivian? Am I ruining lives tonight?"
"You mean, besides ours? ~ Sarah Cross

Then, early, early, early in the morning-just as in countless Disney films-I heard a rooster crow. But guess what? They don't do it just once. ~ Vivian Vande Velde

If gardens are created to tell stories, which I believe they are, then garden gates are the crucial opening lines that can make or break a tale. ~ Vivian Swift

Where's Vivian?" someone called from the hallway. I was pushed closer to the edge, almost caught with my underpants in my mouth and a finger in my ass. Fear buzzed and amplified the pleasure. ~ C.D. Reiss

The true path to success is to find your joy and share it with others. ~ Vivian Amis

I considered organizing a game of wits - " "Admitting defeat already, are you? Since you're unarmed? ~ Vivian Arend

If you think you need to forgive anyone ... you got it all wrong. ~ Vivian Amis

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to end, it's about learning do dance in the rain. ~ Vivian Greene

In the Pretty Woman shopping scene, it's not really about the clothes, or how much they cost, or how great she looks. When Vivian leaves the store, she's not only a pretty woman, she's a different woman. It gets me every time. ~ Victoria Van Tiem

I hated being "Mrs." from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn't the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity. ~ Vivian Gornick

I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing. ~ Vivian Gornick

The bear and I --
we rise like a windstorm
to witness these old trees talk. ~ Vivian Demuth

Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession ... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that ~ Vivian Gornick

When people asked about his schizophrenia, Eric, who didn't exactly flaunt his illness but wasn't ashamed of it, either, offered up the comparison of alcoholism. Not every drunk is a single bourbon away from skid row, just like every schizophrenic is not a tatty-haired, crazy-eyed gunman who delights in murdering alien-people from clock towers. There are functioning alcoholics just as there are functioning schizophrenics, individuals who work, maintain homes, and have hobbies, goals, and relationships like every other slob on the planet. ~ Vivian Barz

They'd poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar's safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it. ~ Vivian Vande Velde

How could I love a man as uptight as Nathan Edwards and still have a raging crush on someone as wicked as Ronnie Radke? Maybe I am an undiagnosed schizophrenic. That's what happened to Jamie Foxx's character in The Soloist. One day, he's a gifted musical student at Julliard, and the next day he's toting his cello through the streets of Los Angeles, disoriented and muttering to himself. "What are you thinking, Vivian?" I drop my hand and look at my best friend. "Nothing." "Vivian?" I grimace. "Do you think I have schizophrenia?" Fanny tosses her pillow at me. "Shut up! ~ Leah Marie Brown

Hell,huh? Well,hopefully we'll be able to disprove that theory soon.Besides, if it were hell,would I be here with you?"
"I don't know,if hell called for an eternity of annoyance instead of torment,maybe."
"I like you more every day.But neither of us qualifies for hell. We're victims." He smiled, the last word laced with venom. "And if we're occasionally wicked,well, certainly we'd be justified."
i wondered if he was trying to comfort me about Vivian,but he stared into the distance as though anticipating future wickedness. What did he want me to light on fire this time? I didn't think I was up for more destruction. ~ Kiersten White

Don't you think it seems a little... backward, perhaps...to run around committing mortal sins in order to cleanse the world of sin and evil? ~ Vivian Shaw

It is unfortunate that we have to live in a fortress, but we are forced to do so given the high crime rate in the country. I travel with two bodyguards all the time and there is substantial cost involved ~ Vivian Reddy

This is not my first road trip and it's not my first marriage either. I know that my hissy fit in Fougeres and our bad luck on the road to Bordeaux does not spell doom for either our love affair or our journey. Love affairs are like road trips, and road trips are like love affairs -- from beginning to end the emotions are equally intense, the phases just as predictable. Love and travel. They both have their ups and downs. ~ Vivian Swift

Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty. ~ Brian Morton

You can't find peace until you find all the pieces. She wants to help Vivian find some kind of peace, elusive and fleeting as it may be. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Romance is showing my new husband the places and things that mean the most to me.


I can't help it if some of those places and things are in France. ~ Vivian Swift

I still have people saying to me, 'Oh, you're still together?' They don't realize Leppard's been around this whole time, because people just don't get to hear us. ~ Vivian Campbell

For me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform. ~ Vivian Gornick

Virat Kohli has so far shown that he has more ability and talent than anybody else, and if he can play till 32 or 34 with same fitness and without injuries, he will come to a point where not even Vivian Richards neither Sachin Tendulkar had such a record. ~ Kapil Dev

These are very difficult times for new artists. Back in the day, a hit song could really seep into a person's DNA with radio and MTV. A hit today is not the same as a hit twenty years ago. Now there is so much competition, it is very hard to reach the people. The music scene is so overly saturated. There are no gatekeepers like there used to be. ~ Vivian Campbell

I think it's time for me to completely surrender myself to you. Your father explained some things to me while we spent time together, and he told me that in order for me to be true and righteous towards you, I must give you my secret treasure to willfully submit to you. I want you to have complete domination over me, because I don't want to love anyone else but you," she replied. "I want to satisfy all of your needs and desires, so I am willfully being submissive to you," she explained, as she rubbed lubricant between her creases. ~ Vivian Blue

She'd been in Budapest for over four weeks and her sister Vivian had been silent since her arrival. All Sarah had was the final note her dead sister made her write telling her that Armond Stuart had fled to Hungary. ~ Jonas Saul

She was insane, and this was Janie. This was the Janie who loved fire and carried rocks. This was the Janie Vivian who trusted rarely but deeply, and hoped with everything she was. This was the Janie Vivian, who I had loved with every atom in every cell in my body before memory was relevant. ~ Amy Zhang

Those Grimm brothers," she said with a sigh, "they'll never amount to anything." And she was right because all they ever became was writers. ~ Vivian Vande Velde

Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important. ~ Vivian Gornick

She should be grateful. Without Vivian she'd be sliding down a dark path toward nowhere good . But it kind of feels nice to nurture her resentment, to foster it. It's something she can savor and control, this feeling of having been wronged by the world. That she has fulfilled her role as a thieving member of the underclass, now indentured to this genteel midwestern white lady, is too perfect for words. ~ Christina Baker Kline

The multiverse has selected its champions – had selected you – and yet under the blazing suns, here we stand: self-seeking and imperfect, lacking in wisdom, lacking in courage, afraid of death and of pain; afraid of our choices and the consequences they bring - '

' - and you ask yourselves: if only I could be that one person that makes it all better; that stops the degrading of worldly values. If only I could be that brave person that brings out the good in the bad. ~ Louise Blackwick

Vivian's first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one.

The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more.

As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders. ~ Louise Blackwick

The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination. I paid a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things, leveling an intent inner stare at the prototypic face of the world. These streets were all streets, these buildings all buildings, these women and men all women and men. I could imagine no other than that which stood before me. That child's literalness of the emotions continued to exert influence, as though a shock had been administered to the nervous system and the flow of imagination had stopped. I could feel strongly, but I could not imagine. The granite gray of the street, the American-cheese yellow of the grocery store, the melancholy brownish tint of the buildings were all still in place, only now it was the woman on the couch, the girl hanging out the window, the confinement that sealed us off, on which I looked with that same inner intentness that had always crowded out possibility as well as uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression. ~ Vivian Gornick

All the forecasts were tentatively hopeful about the idea of it not actually continuing to rain for the remainder of ever, but Varney had his doubts. It really did seem slightly sinister. ~ Vivian Shaw

You are not, who you think you are ~ Vivian Amis

who are brave in ways that people often can't see on the outside - doing what's needed for their children and themselves. Your strength amazes ~ Vivian Arend

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the 'emptiness of a woman's life' as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analysed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley.

Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion? ~ Vivian Gornick

When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me. ~ Vivian Gornick

Life isn't about waiting for the showers to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain." - Vivian Greene ~ Mary C. Neal

What?" I ask, throwing my hands up, and then pointing at the woman. "Don't even look at me like that, lady. You know after having that baby, your vagina probably looks like wrinkled roast beef curtains. So don't kid yourself...because your vagina hates you." ~Vivian ~ S.L. Romines

And also they're just good escapist fun," Vivian said firmly, and Gill subsided beside her, giving an apologetic smile. "To read about these horrible things and know they never happened, and when you're finished you can put down the book and take a deep breath and get on with your life. To know it's fiction – "
"Pulp fiction," Gill said ... ~ Lavie Tidhar

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work. ~ Vivian Gornick

Sometimes it's good to shake up the status quo. You just have to make sure that when you turn society on its ear, you don't end up on your coutoure-covered backside."--vivian ~ Donna Kauffman

Self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions. ~ Vivian Gornick

Few of us have the necessary unselfishness to hear with gladness the talents of others extolled or to listen with patience to the successes of those whom we despise - Vivian ~ D.E. Stevenson

The Blues
The Blahs
The Weary Dismals
Lost in Gloom
Woesome Me's
The Eternal 3 AM of the Soul. ~ Vivian Swift

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. ~ Vivian Gornick

Do you know what a Palmist once said to me? She said: will you let go! ~ Vivian Stanshall

Grisaille let go of Ruthven and flopped face downward onto the duvet, with a creak of springs.

'I am never leaving this bed again,' he said, muffled by the covers. 'I am amalgamated with this bed. This bed and I have achieved spiritual oneness. I am it and it is me. ~ Vivian Shaw

I trained and worked really hard all my life in dance classes. I always fell into the shadows of my mother, and it was hard for me to really realize that I had done the work. Yes, she took me to the best teachers, but I did the work. ~ Vivian Nixon

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary.

Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort. ~ Vivian Gornick

She tried to explain to them it wasn't the place that made people uncultured but their attitudes. ~ Vivian Arend

If you happen to be a person who does not enjoy your own company, a visit to Edinburgh in January will teach you how it's done. ~ Vivian Swift

Technology has made it much easier to make and manipulate music. Studio-driven, machine-driven music does not always transcend into being a good live act. Many current acts are great live, but many cannot cut it live. The music is not organic. ~ Vivian Campbell

Your profound words are too much for my ears to bear, as I listen to each and every senseous phrase that your lips impart ~ Vivian E. Moore

You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says.
"Do you believe that?"
"Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart? ~ Anita Shreve

How much do you want? Do you want three meals in a hawker centre, food court or restaurant? ~ Vivian Balakrishnan

The Prayer that is answered is not of many words, but of Oneness. ~ Vivian Amis

And things are never okay. It does get better I guess, in that you grow to love yourself if you're lucky. But it doesn't get better because life is hard, and people aren't always nice. ~ Justin Vivian Bond

I could never understand how he always seemed so sure of himself. But now I did. It was because Connor really did know what kind of person he was. He had no regrets because he always shot from his heart. ~ Siobhan Vivian

We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes. ~ Vivian Gornick

Are these the friends and life i want to have? ~ Siobhan Vivian

Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts? ... Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts ... They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind."
"Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles."
"The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. ~ Christina Baker Kline

I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it. ~ Vivian Stanshall

This last bit is proof. Proof that Milo doesn't really get her. He never did. ~ Siobhan Vivian

It was a serious offense to invite a Deep Witch to cross the border of the Five Kingdoms. They had been banished many years before, together with werewolves and sorcerers. ~ Vivian French

there are times when no one is right, and sometimes among family and children, no one can admit that there is no right, and that maybe at the same time there is no wrong. But in this case I was wrong and I appreciate Vivian Baxter for being big enough to accept my apology. ~ Maya Angelou

We all need a cheering committee and parents are a child's most important fans! ~ Vivian Kirkfield

You see, the best thing about wrong decisions is that they don't prevent you from making the right decisions later on. It's harder, but it's not impossible. ~ Siobhan Vivian

I'm uncontrollably in love with Vivian. In such a short amount of time she's infiltrated my thoughts, cast a spell over my body, and wormed her way into the deepest part of my heart. A day without her would feel like a lifetime without breath, an eternity without light. ~ Jewel E. Ann

On the PBS recording of 'The Light in the Piazza' backstage, you get to see me doing some sweet lunges down the hallway of the Vivian Beaumont. ~ Aaron Lazar

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

All of her aunts said that Bridget looked exactly like her mother as a teenager. Staring at her, Bridget realised she had no memories of her mother being thin. ~ Siobhan Vivian

Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one. ~ Vivian Gornick

I'm waiting for the magic word." "Um, now?" "Really?" "Asshole?" "Come on." "Clark!" "Vivian." "Oh, fine. Please help me, Clark. Please, please, please?" I managed, gritting my teeth. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" he smiled, his face lighting up. ~ Alice Clayton

Maybe you haven't noticed, but everyone shares the same brain around here. It's like a mass cult. They've all drunk the Kool-Aid. ~ Siobhan Vivian

...the habitants, dressed in their brightest colors and wearing their shoes, lined the Route de Rivière, waving and shouting, "Bon jour, Monsieur Reneau. Congratulations on your marriage." Once he passed however, they whispered to each other. "Poor Monsieur Reneau. Certainly he is a fertile man, two wives, sixteen daughters, yet no son."
"The Reneau seed is cursed," some surmised but others held out hope for their Seigneur. "Perhaps this third wife will give him a healthy boy, eh?"
Zacharie, third Lord of Paradise.
The Last Lord of Paradise––Generation Three ~ Vivian LeMay

Humanity is always quick to condemn itself. ~ Vivian Eve

Each child wants to know immediately if he is a worthy person in your eyes. You cannot pretend, because the child knows all the things about himself that worry him. If you act like you like him, but ignore the things he is anxious about, it doesn't count. The child is glad you are nice to him, but deep down he figures if you really knew what he was like, you'd hate him. So your liking him without knowing him just makes him feel guilty. ~ Vivian Gussin Paley

Greta smiled suddenly, and he had to blink. It was a little like watching a small and self-contained sunrise. 'Thank you,' she said. 'I'm...very glad you're here.'

Just for a moment, Varney thought that *he* was, too. For a moment. ~ Vivian Shaw

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I'm safe. I'm free. I'm thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. ~ Vivian Gornick

Skulls" said Lady Lamorna. "Definitely skulls. Rows and rows of dear little skulls, sewn all along the hem. ~ Vivian French

I loathed William Frawley and the feeling was mutual. Whenever I received a new script, I raced through it, praying that there wouldn't be a scene where we had to be in bed together. ~ Vivian Vance

God is closer than you think, closer than thinking, before thought. ~ Vivian Amis

It was just my reality, to never have a boy be interested in me romantically for more than one random moment. Like a TV show you don't like but you end up watching anyway, because there's nothing else on. ~ Siobhan Vivian

Vivian, if I had a dollar for every time you confused the hell out of me today, I would be a rich man," he says, interlocking his fingers behind his head. "Now, can we please get in the hotel so we can shower and get some sleep? Or are we just going to stand here and talk about neck biting cocks all night." ~Jax ~ S.L. Romines

New York isn't jobs, they reply, it's temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence - in large quantities - of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot. ~ Vivian Gornick

If you are normal, I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life ~ Vivian Stanshall

Really", Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, "the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect. ~ Vivian Shaw

Why can't I be different and unusual ... like everyone else? ~ Vivian Stanshall

For a production that suggests a mysterious dreamscape, I have a particular affection for the Vivian Beaumont Theater. It is the largest dramatic space available in New York City in terms of plays, although musicals have been done there very successfully as well. ~ Jack O'Brien