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The heavy smell of four o’clocks burdened the air, and we could hear the sea gulls mewing like cats.
they both laughed in a way that made me dreadfully homesick—but I guess it was for something I’d never had.
I wondered what it must feel like to be part of the beach and have the water caressing you daily. I thought a mother should caress the way the ocean did.
At the beach the evenings are longer than anywhere else at home because the whiteness of the sand holds the light as long as it can. But even at the beach it comes as a surprise. One minute it’s bright daylight and the next minute you can’t see two feet in front of you.
Sweet and so true.
Our town was rather odd that way—too far south to be really southern in the old tradition, and yet not far south enough to be a resort.
Aunt Violetta was so delicate and so refined that she died of embarrassment in childbirth.
Hilarious. From the mouths of babes...
When you walk along the damp sand in your bare feet just as morning breaks, I think, no matter who you are or how old you are, you feel ten years younger.
It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness.
And then, suddenly, I was flooded with the most overwhelming waves of homesickness I had ever known. Not homesickness for the destroyed town, or our lost, white-pillared house, or my small mahogany spool bed that was no more; but waves of homesickness for a coquina and cypress house set far back on the dunes, for a bare room furnished in unpainted pine, for Ilsa’s authoritative voice, and Dr. Brandes’ quiet one, and Ira’s cross one. I wanted to weep with an agony of longing for a place and for people I had never seen or known a few short days ago.
This just hit me like a ton of bricks. I know how this feels. Sobbing. What potent, emotional writing.
the room was so dark that the only things visible seemed to be the white coat of the butler and the eyes of the portraits staring down at me from the walls.
You’d think one would be more than enough of him to send into the world at a time.
This woman is a southern Maggie Smith in my mind, and I'm not mad about it.
No one is without a grain of insanity. On nights like this there’s something about to burst inside me, something sobbing and wailing like the doves on the summerhouse, and I have to walk it up and down as though it were a baby, to try and quiet it.
But she was one of those people who change very little between twenty and sixty. Instead of growing and developing into whatever kind of creatures they are, slowly and consistently, they have three periods of their lives, with sharp lines of demarcation between them: they are children, then grownups, then old men and women.
When once you have discovered how indiscriminately and lightly death can strike, you expect to find it everywhere. To a boy of fifteen the knowledge that someone who has been an alive part of his life can disappear and leave no noticeable vacancy in the universe is frightening; and the unimportance of death becomes the most important thing in the world.
Her words were just a little slurred, her voice like smoke from smouldering grass after a forest fire.
I have a pitcher into which the people I love have poured themselves. I have accepted everything and been allowed to give nothing. When they discover that I have passions of my own it seems to jar them.
I noticed that she never said home except when she referred to the house at the beach.
All that I could do was to take my part of the eight years, my part only; this I could fold and pack, like eight years’ accumulation of goods and chattels into one trunk and valise and an empty violin case; sorting, discarding, throwing away as much as possible, so that when I got home there would be room for me to assimilate and hold what had happened while I was gone, so that somehow everything that had happened to Ilsa would become part of my experience, too.
I was filled with a kind of despair because I knew I had made a mess of the life I had tried to make away from home, and to return and find that I was not only critical, but didn’t even want to come back, was unnerving. I didn’t want to come home, yet there was no place on earth to go.
Her welcoming flow of words seemed to have dried up. I was home now. I had been properly greeted. She evidently felt that she had exerted herself enough in my behalf.
She’s been like a mother to me. Maybe even more, because we’ve never had the embarrassment of intimacy that inevitably comes when one woman has borne another.
Ilsa about Anna. Lovely relationship there.
I looked at Silver as she went from crib to crib, looking down at the sleeping, heat-flushed little boys; and as I watched her face I knew why she no longer looked like Mamma. Mamma had never looked at either of her children like that.
It’s funny, you know—he’s really very dependent on me in a strange sort of way. Sometimes, when I find myself quieting him down, calming him, I feel as old as the moon, and just as burnt out.
Wonderful description of a complicated feeling. An emotion I can relate to.
But Hamlet—Hamlet infuriated me just because he was so damn good and I knew he shouldn’t have been.
She always laughed a great deal, a free open laugh that expressed for me the objectivity with which she seemed, at any rate, to look on life.
A cuckoo puppy never looks as though it would grow up into a serious hunter.
If Papa had only made me work at the mill, or really sent me off to earn my own living as he so often threatened to do, I might have turned out to be more of a person.
“I don’t understand you, Mamma,” Brand said. “Children aren’t supposed to understand their mothers. Mothers are supposed to understand their children. And that’s just as silly.”
“Oh, Brother, you know why. I hate to see you like this, and every year it just gets worse. You’re still young. You’re only thirty-three. It’s not too late to go off somewhere and begin over again.” “Begin what over again?” “Your life.”
She turned to the actor. “I don’t suppose you’ve got round to learning how to drive?” He shook his head. “No, but I can ride an elephant.”
Hahahaha what a divine reply. I love Franz. :)
“But why live?” Myra asked desperately. “Life isn’t attractive. We have to struggle to eat, struggle against the weather, we ride in crowded buses, teach stupid children things they don’t want to know, we drink and smoke and walk down the street to the drugstore, go to church and sing hymns in shrill nasal voices, go to recitals at the Woman’s Club—and why? For what? Just because we want to live? I don’t think so.
“I don’t want to believe in God,” Myra said fiercely, sitting up in the hammock and lighting another cigarette with trembling fingers. “But I’ve got to because I’m afraid. Even a cruel, despotic, Old Testament God is better than none. To be lost in a Godless world is the most terrible of all punishments.”
Well. This has taken a decidedly philosophical turn...
“Most of us feel,” she said, “that the only point in our living at all is because of the few great individuals who inspire us to rise out of our mediocrity. But my God, my God in heaven, it is these individuals who have caused our downfall, who have made the world the confused and agonizing place that it is. Because they are greater than we are, they have betrayed us. They’ve made great discoveries, especially in science, and they’ve been able to teach us the mechanical side of these discoveries. But the more important, the spiritual aspect hardly anybody can understand. We haven’t progressed
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More amazing thought-time with Myra.
To a sand crab, I thought, it must seem that this world of shifting sand is the only thing there is. To a starfish it must seem that there is nothing but the cool luminous water. And yet suddenly the starfish will find itself tossed carelessly up onto the beach, spewed out and ignored by the ocean it adores, left impartially to dry on the burning breathless sand. So is it not, I thought, consistent to wonder if there is not somewhere an end to our space, to our infinity? Beyond that purple sea of sky and stars what arid sands may not lie? Beyond our own clumsy conception of time—seconds,
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My love affair with this book is getting serious.
I knew that I no longer had the courage to go on being a coward.
Most likely the greatest line in the entire novel. LOVE.
If I flung myself out of my accustomed course, they might at least say, “Look, there goes a shooting star,” as I flashed briefly across the sky.
Kind of a suicidal thought, in a rhetorical sense. And a small one. One to which I think lots of us can relate from time to time.
I noticed that he was allowed to lead her when the rest of us would have been angrily pushed away because he did it with an utter lack of self-consciousness.
Franz Josef Werner = Phineas
stood at the edge of the water, shells and sand swirling about my ankles. There didn’t seem much point in going in when there was no one for me to protect and no one to protect me.
She stalked to the door, then paused and said to the room in general. “I did my best. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
Oh my laughing, broken heart!
