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'Such eyes! Melchior's eyes, warm and dark and sexy as the inside of a London cab in wartime. His eyes.'

I love the way Dora can write about her father, now that she's turning 75. There's no shame in admitting his attractiveness. It isn't weird. It's more heartbreaking than anything else. And Nora's daddy issues are no mystery.

'we gazed with moonstruck adoration at the very towel our father had dried his hands on, the razor he'd shaved with, the greasepaint he'd put on his beloved face - all these things had far more intimate relations with him than we did and seemed almost holy, in our eyes. His mirror, that had the joy and honour of reflecting him.'

My heart can't handle this.

'I love the artificial dark of the matinee, the same, exciting dark you get when you draw the curtains after lunch to go to bed.'

I will have to think about this during my next matinee. They usually make me horribly sleepy and I have to take a Five Hour Energy to feel up to putting on a show.

'The lights went down, the bottom of the curtain glowed. I loved it and have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.'

Lovely. So is the wink-wink bit about foreplay in the next line, too.

'Over the years, Peregrine offered us a Chinese banquet of options as to what hapened to him next...Did he really meet up with Ambrose Bierce in a flophouse in El Paso and go off with him to fight in Mexico? (In confirmation of this, in sole confirmation, I'm bound to say, one personalised dedication in a copy of The Devil's Dictionary.)'

I'm going to write a dedication to Peregrine in my own copy when I get home.

'The old men get so they can't stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren't be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn't stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we'll kill off yours. So that's that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds again.'

'Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come out in monochrome.'

'We're stuck in the period at which we peaked, of course. All women do. We'd feel mutilated if you made us wipe off our Joan Crawford mouths and we always do our hair up in great big Victory rolls when we go out...We paint an inch thick..Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge. Revlon, fire and ice. The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.'

They're adorable.

So, these pronouns. And the rope. And all the things I feel the need to turn back to now. Like "the tragedy of the little girl hanging from a tree" which hasn't been explicitly shown yet in the novel. I just. What is going on?

Anyone else disturbed and confused and full of dread?

I love Etsuko's response to her daughter's contempt for the neighbor girl who still lives in her hometown.

'I saw them often enough when I used to know Cathy. People like that are so hopeless. I suppose I ought to feel sorry for Cathy.'
'You're blaming her because she hasn't gone to live in London like you have? I must say, Niki, that doesn't sound like the broadmindedness you and your friends seem so proud of.'

'I've come to appreciate cooking over the years. It's an art, I'm convinced of it, just as noble as painting or poetry. It's not appreciated simply because the product disappears too quickly.'

I like Father.

"Father" and Etsuko's is darling. With everyone else, Etsuko speaks literally nothing but formalities.

'What is it you're cooking me there?'
'Nothing much. Just leftovers from last night. At such short notice, you don't deserve any better.'
'...What's that you're doing with the egg? That's not a leftover too, is it?'
'I'm adding an omelette. You're very fortunate, Father. I'm in such a generous mood.'

Not enough space to record the whole thing, but Sand reacting to an old diary:

"what it contains is the most unadulterated idiocy. Today it all seems to me to be terribly over-emphatic, though at the time I was convinced of my sincerity. Can one ever really sum oneself up? Does one ever truly know oneself?"

Familiar.

The tragedy for my contemporaries is that they would like to return to the past, and returning to the past is something we can never do. One is like a flowing, babbling stream, and, surely, when the water has reflected beautiful things which one has loved and sung, it has flowed and babbled for long enough. To go on would be tedious; to begin again, terrifying.

Of all Sand's motherly words of defense when l'Education sentimentale receives hostile reviews, my favorite is this subtle little one:

"He does not know whether he is a poet or a realist, and, since he is both, he feels cramped."

Their mutual adoration is absolutely adorable.

On love during her generation: "We despised paddling in the shallows. What we wanted was to swim far out above unsounded depths, and the further we went the more hopelessly lost did we become. To get away from the ruck of our fellows, to put an even greater distance between ourselves and the safety of dry land, to strike out onward and ever onward - that was what we longed for."

"In old age the human heart becomes a cemetery. Those whom one has loved dearly, those whom one has loved too little, wander at night among the tombs."

This is the point in every biography where I start getting weepy.

"How your enthusiasms do fade: how many of the stars in your firmament are shooting stars?"

I would like to read all of Marie d'Argoult's letters. She has no filter and I love it.

I'm actually crying.

'Harrison: Teach me how to act.

She: What?

Harrison: I want you to take me to a theater and kiss me once a week, and pretend I'm someone else. Once a week I can be whoever you want me to be, and you can be whoever I want you to be. Kiss me in a place with no history, and no furniture.'

PLOT TWIST muahahahahaha

'He: They liked it.

She: They seemed to. How odd.

He: There's no accounting for taste.

He: They're still clapping. Should we go on for another bow?

She: You whore.'

I NEED IT.

'She: We don't fight. My husband. And I. He's comforting. He comforts me.

He: Like a hot cup of tea? With exactly the right amount of milk?

She: No, more like a person. Who exhibits restraint and compassion.

He: Like tea.'

Me: Can I please do this show?

He: I wanted to be ugly. A writer. Make something lasting.

She: Were you ever unambivalent - about anything?

He: You.

She: For a time.

He: For a time.

She: Favorite last line from a play:

He & She: I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time...

'Kevin: What a strange job to kiss in front of people and make it look like you know each other. Or kiss someone you know in front of people and make it look like a stranger.'

He's adorable.

Heeh! I want to play this part. One of the few stage directions here. Necessary.

She, returning after abruptly leaving the audition:

'She: I think I just left my bag...

(She grabs her bag, everything topples out of it.)

She: Oh, right, the minor humiliations of life...sorry...good luck with your day, hope you see some good people, I haven't auditioned for a play in like ten years.'

I need it.

I love how Ruhl gives no direction for delivery. No adjectives or pauses in italics between parentheses. Like 'She', at auditions:

"Could you position your chair this way then? Sorry, is that weird? I had sort of pictured your chair this way. Should I start?"

I know how I would want to move and pause articulate and what/when I'd express. I also know dozens of actors who would do it completely differently.

Maurois has bouts of idiocy that make reading him nearly insufferable. Luckily they only last a paragraph or so.

"Pleasure in passion is, for the woman, a function of the imagination."

You're an idiot.

"The contradictions which had set the minds of great men at odds, tormented her, and she tried 'to bring into a common focus, a universal harmony, those many lights of different colours which flickered about her, like the flutter of flames on the hearth, and the light of the moon, in a room."

I wonder if this tone belongs to Maurois' or Hopkins. My money is on the latter.

ANOTHER SPOILER:
Seriously, I warned you.

"It is exceptionally lonely, being Draco Malfoy."