Suanne Laqueur > Suanne's Quotes

“She smiled back at him. Neither of them had said so much as hello yet she was looking at him with those eyes. Deep in the cathedral of his young being, Erik felt a bell toll, a peal of recognition. And for the rest of his life, he would swear, he would swear to anyone who asked, although nothing was said aloud, he heard Daisy Bianco speak to him. She said it with her eyes, he heard it clearly in his head, and it wasn’t hello.
It was, 'Well, here you are...'
Here I am, he thought.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“You haven’t seen your father since you were eight?'
He shook his head.
'No word. No contact. No nothing?'
'Nothing.'
Daisy’s eyes looked right and left before coming back to his. 'Is he alive?'
Erik turned looked into the blue-green eyes studying him so intently. He was surprised he had revealed this to someone he barely knew. Normally this was the card he kept closest to his chest. Yet something about Daisy looking at him, her expression calm and interested, sympathetic but not pitying, tactfully curious, seemed to be reaching into the tangle of emotions comprising the experience of being so cruelly deserted, and gently drawing out a thread.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“A hush fell over them. For a long moment, while she was leaning her chin on her hand atop the piano lid, and his hands rested lightly on the keys, they stared at each other. The stage, the wings, the maw of the theater and its rows of seats and ornamental moldings, all receded. The air about them shimmered, drew in, coalesced into a bubble. They looked at each other, breathing together, long past a socially acceptable interval. It was far beyond the border where Erik normally would have dropped his gaze, cracked a joke or at least a smile.
She’s peaceful, he thought, and her eyes widened slightly, as if she had heard him.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“Look, no gay man is oblivious to a beautiful woman. I’m gay, I’ve partnered women and believe me, you feel it going on. Beauty is beauty. And straight or gay, you are immersed in this intense, artistic chemistry which is both sensual and sensory. Chemistry is chemistry. It just isn’t rooted in sexual attraction.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“Daisy seems the type who likes to make something beautiful with her partner, rather than just be carried around and adored in the spotlight. So I imagine she’s generous and forgiving in the dark.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“And then they were staring again. And it happened again, just as it had in the theater yesterday. Time slowed, atoms and particles separating and recombining into a secret sphere around them.
'I like you,' he said.
Her hand out on the table again, between them, and he put his on it. 'I like you,' she said, almost soundless.
They stared on through another timeless moment, after which she went back to her book, and he bent his head over his work again. They held hands on the table, held feet beneath. Erik had never been so relaxed with a girl, never known such comfort with another human being. He had no desire to leave this space, and yet within it, he was free. He could sit with her and feel what he was feeling, with no need to explain it, dismiss it or joke it away. Every time he looked up at her and thought, I love this, she looked up too, and her eyes seemed to nod at him.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“It's much more difficult to have conflict when there are cookies around.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“The field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.

Which is to say: there are no rules.
Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“I want to kiss you until I die”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

“Everything I thought I knew about what it meant to be a man was stripped away. What remained was what it meant to be a man who loved a woman as much as I did. To be a human being experiencing this life in all its ugliness, its beauty, its pain and hate; good and evil; love and death.”
― Emma Scott, Endless Possibility

“I apologize for anything I might have done. I was not myself.”
“I apologize for shooting you in the leg.” said Lila. “I was myself entirely.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Astrid Dane. . . Her long colorless hair was woven back into a braid, and her porcelain skin bled straight into the edges of her tunic. Her entire outfit was fitted to her like armor; the collar of her shirt was high and rigid, guarding her throat, and the tunic itself ran from chin to wrist to waist, less out of a sense of modesty, Kell was sure, than protection. Below a gleaming silver belt, she wore fitted pants that tapered into tall boots (rumor had it that a man once spat at her for refusing to wear a dress; she’d cut off his lips). The only bits of color were the pale blue of her eyes and the greens and reds of the talismans that hung from her neck and wrists and were threaded through her hair. . .
“I smell something sweet,” she said. She’d been gazing up at the ceiling. Now her eyes wandered
down and landed on Kell. “Hello, flower boy.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you've got those autumn blues. And some...well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair.”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend. Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count’s would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Jav’s face was numb. Fingertips ice cold. His shirt stuck to his back with sweat and every square inch o“f skin prickled and tingled. He could feel his heart breaking down, dropping off piece by piece into the rolling boil of his stomach. Every splash sending up clouds of toxic steam, choking his throat. He was sure the next words out would be inside a scream. Instead he heard a strong, calm voice—a seasoned captain taking over the helm.
“I’m with you,” Jav said. “Fucking take their ship down. I’m here. Right until the end, I won’t leave.”

Excerpt From: Suanne Laqueur. “An Exaltation of Larks.” iBooks.”
― Suanne Laqueur, An Exaltation of Larks

“I felt suddenly shy.     I was not used to shy.     I was used to shame.     Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.     Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I pulled the book from him.     It was wet with tears running down the pages, as if the book itself were crying.     He hid his face in his hands.     Let me see you cry, I told him. I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right. It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him.     Let me see you cry.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it!”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“You can't ride a book," Phillip said with a shrug.  "A book won't nuzzle you.  It doesn't have a soul or a personality." The teacher's scowl eased into a small smile.  "There we must disagree.”
― Iscah, Before the Fairytale: Horse Feathers

“Your daughter went to bed on the eve of her thirteenth birthday as a sweetheart, and woke up the next morning a bitch. You never stopped loving her, but goddamn, you had a lot of days when you didn’t like her. At all.”
― Suanne Laqueur, An Exaltation of Larks

“She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don’t hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember. She felt tender toward their wrinkles, arthritic fingers, and poor sight. She imagined how she herself would be as an elderly and then ancient woman.”
― Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover

“He kissed like a fucking dream. Like Deane filled out an application, requested, “Send me a boy who kisses like this,” and the universe followed instructions to the letter.”
― Suanne Laqueur, An Exaltation of Larks

“Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, that her mother would still love her even though she hadn’t waved good-bye. For one day, her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn’t been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about their Heart’s Desire—well that’s a load of rot. Hearts are idiots. They’re big and squishy and full of daft dreams. They flounce off to write poetry and moon at folk who aren’t worth the mooning. Bones are the ones that have to make the journey, fight the monster, kneel before whomever is big on kneeling these days. Bones do the work for the heart’s grand plans. Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.”
― Carol Shields

“I can’t,” he whispered, knowing he could, but wishing with every fiber of his being he didn’t have to.
“You can,” Will said. “You don’t have to do it well. You just have to do it.”
― Suanne Laqueur, Here to Stay

“Love can bring out the best and worst in us. We’ve all been a jackass for love. But love makes us do amazing things. And if love drives us away, love is what brings us back. Love makes up pick up the phone. Love makes us listen. Love makes us say I’m sorry. Love makes us forgive. Love makes us better. Love makes us our best.”
― Suanne Laqueur, Here to Stay