Down Town Quotes

“I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, 'It is like drinking stars'.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait.

Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“(voice)...it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...leaving the air crystal and sweet and the dusty, used leaves sparkling. The lake surface was a diamond-dusted, dancing indigo...”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“At the dune line, just before the whispering stands of sea oats and dune grass began, the sand was as damp and cold as the skin of a snake under my feet.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of starts fardly showed through the scrim of high clouds. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea's breath. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crepe myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says 'ocean' to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...and turned his eyes the color of a winter sea.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“Be careful who you love. They'll be part of you always. Even after the love is long dead, the fuckers'll be part of you.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“  Sometimes—not very often, in any life—there come days so perfect and seamless and golden that you remember them always. Almost everyone has them, though some, I think, have more than others. It just isn’t given to everyone to simply love a day for its own sake. But they are the very coin of memory, and you can pull them out over and over again and fondle them, and spend them, and they are never depleted.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Downtown

“...the pastel sea of trees and flowers.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“So clear that you could see every delicate vein in the lacquered new leaves; so soft that you felt the air on newly bared arms like velvet; so suffused with every shade of green that it seemed that your very blood ran green, in harmony.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town