Janice > Janice's Quotes

“One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.”
― Garrison Keillor

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“In Paris there are wide cityscapes like nowhere else. Habit has made us indifferent to them. But those who wander around the city—keenly sniffing the air, looking to be moved, to be amazed—are very familiar with these places.”
― Helen Constantine, Paris Metro Tales

“I collapsed next to him on the bed and he slowly peeled off the rest of my wardrobe. We made love by moonlight.”
― Janice Macleod, Paris Letters

“Paris does something to a person. It unleashes the pent-up romantic. Even if you’re not the touchy-feely type, you find yourself begging to hold hands and grope the nearest person as you walk over a bridge just so you can say later that you did it and wasn’t that marvelous. What was his name? Does it matter?”
― Janice Macleod, Paris Letters

“the two dresses she’d brought with her in case of—well, just in case—stood in the corner of her closet like guests who have come to the wrong party and are backing out the door.”
― Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs

“I know that within you there is an energy of forgiveness that forgives me and sets me free. My words and actions have no power over you. You are free and I am free. All is well between our spirits. Peace is the order of the day.”
― Michael Bernard Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul's Potential

“I forgive you and set you free. Your actions no longer have power over me. I acknowledge that you are doing the best that you can, and I honor you in your process of unfoldment. You are free and I am free. All is well between us. Peace is the order of the day.”
― Michael Bernard Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul's Potential

“The gargoyles were worth the climb: Some seemed so real they could easily have been demons turned to stone. One appeared to be biting the head off of some much smaller creature—a tiny man?—clutched in his claws. Another was contemplative, his monkeylike face resting in the palms of his oversized hands, as he observed his domain. Others stuck out their tongues, bared their teeth, made faces. Their expressions were so elastic and whimsical it was hard to believe they were carved of stone.”
― Juliet Blackwell, The Paris Key

“La Maréchalerie means “blacksmith shop” in French, and the building was decorated with horseshoes and the head of a horse emerging from a shield. Genevieve had been confused by these as a teenager: What did horses have to do with bread? She remembered rushing back to the house and looking up the name in her travel dictionary but was still just as confused until Catharine told her it was merely an old building made into a boulangerie. “They don’t take things down here, or change things,” said Catharine, clearly disdainful of her cousin’s interest. “They just leave the name, and the horse decorations, and make their bread.”
― Juliet Blackwell, The Paris Key

“We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way. Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“I imagine a hierarchy of happiness; first purchased in the 1970s, a couple would sit here, dining on meals cooked from brand-new recipe books, eating and drinking from wedding china like proper grown-ups. They’d move to the suburbs after a couple of years; the table, too small to accommodate their growing family, passes on to a cousin newly graduated and furnishing his first flat on a budget. After a few years, he moves in with his partner and rents the place out. For a decade, tenants eat here, a whole procession of them, young people mainly, sad and happy, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, lovers. They’d serve fast food here to fill a gap, or five stylish courses to seduce, carbohydrates before a run and chocolate pudding for broken hearts. Eventually, the cousin sells up and the house clearance people take the table away. It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“The French are obsessed with history, partly out of a genuine affinity for the past, partly from a desire to cling to lost glory.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs