Peg > Peg's Quotes

“What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“The Pontiac dented and rust-flecked meant it was 1974, since cars are the way working-class people of the deep south truly mark their time. Listen to them sometime, when they’re roping for a memory – they will find it next to a yellow Oldsmobile.”
― Rick Bragg, The Prince of Frogtown

“Jack frantically tried to herd my white-hot father into the car before he weighed into the congregation and gave the minister the left foot of fellowship right in his Sunday pants”
― Rick Bragg, The Prince of Frogtown

“Finally, we reach Yellowstone, which is to Winnebagos what upstream is to salmon.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“(Describing a stop at a village cafe in Italy while filming Taming of the Shrew) It was a perfect choice, the kind of place where chickens brood under the table, though there were none here There was the usual arbour of vines. Two men there intrigued Elizabeth. One was a distinguished oldish man, well dressed, who sat alone at a terraced table and neither ate nor drank nor moved. The other looked like a mendicant monk of some obscure order. He read from a parchment and ate bread. He didn't look up at all. He had a large beard. At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love. The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream. we stopped eating our fave (raw kidney beans) and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen. It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they're over. The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where. we drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I've ever seen her and with a wisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E's image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“Noel (Coward) told me, holding my wrist firmly in his beautiful brown hands which at 67 have a couple of faint liver marks, that E and I were so packed with dynamic personality that he expected us any minute to burst at the seams and flow like volcanic lava.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“(While on their yacht, the Kalizma) - It's a day of incomparable beauty. A couple of vagrant clouds, church bells from Beaulieu, half a dozen fishing boats, the ship swinging imperceptibly on her anchor, now towards the Voile d'Or now away. There is a very slight breeze. The flag is as lazy as a cat. There won't be many days as memorable as this. You have to recount them like diamonds in your pocket.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving. Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when i am away from her, and she loves me. She is a prospectus that can never be entirely cataloged, an almanac for Poor Richard. And I'll love her til I die.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“Another letter from Liza (daughter) which we've been puzzling over. She has a word in the letter which is 'irastosable'. I don't what what it means but I shall use it for the rest of my life.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“I loathe, loathe, loathe acting. in studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank clerk must loathe that stinking tube journey every morning and the rush hour madness at night. I loathe it, despise, despise, for Christ's sake, it. Well, that has managed to get a little spleen out of my system.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. i wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same regard as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“It is now eight at night and still it rains and confuse it not with a drizzle. It is an unremitting Dickensian God-despairing world-ending Noachian deluge promising the end of the world by dawn.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries

“Sitting on the poop deck with my infinitely beloved wife who has acquired an even greater weight of love. I keep on mentally looking around to make sure she's there. For why this new and massive re-affirmation of adoration and worship and a promise to myself that I shall never be nasty to her ever again? I will tell you for why. For because for about three minutes this afternoon I thought that I was about to be killed instantaneously and at once, without time to re-tell her how much I love her, to apologize for breaking my contract to look after her forever, for letting her down with a bang (hysterical pun intended) and for having no time to tell her the million things yet to be told and for not realizing and demonstrating my full potential as a husband, provider, lover, and all. (He goes on to describe how he was in a helicopter with others going to a film location in some mountainous area in Sarajevo in the fog and the came right up to some mountains and barely swerved just in time, this went of for a full three minutes of desperate danger) He goes on to say, "There was one blazing mental image that seemed to last right through the enormity. it was E lying in bed on the yacht with a book open at the page where she'd stopped reading with the title front cover and publisher's blurb on the other face up on the bed near her right hand which was out of the covers. She was wearing one of my favorite nightgowns, a blue thing and shorty which she may have been wearing this morning when I said goodbye to her. (I just asked her and she was) She had one leg bent and the other straight. On another level I was telling her over and over again that I loved her, I loved her...The mind is a remarkable instrument. If I wrote down everything I could remember from those interminable seconds it would be a million words....A shorter catastrophe of this kind happened to me before when I was perhaps 19-20 years old but I hadn't learned to love then and to love obsessively.”
― Richard Burton, The Richard Burton Diaries