The Women Quotes

“This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Women

“constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe”
― TC Boyle, The Women

“The thought arrested her and she pulled away from him just to stand there a moment and take in the strangeness of it all. Music drifted down to her then, an odd tinkling sort of music with a rippling rhythmic undercurrent that seemed to tug the melody in another direction altogether, into the depths of a deep churning sea, but beautiful for all that, and so perfect and unexpected. She felt languid and free--all eyes were on her, every man turning to stare--and it came to her that she loved this place, this moment, these people. She could stay here forever, right here, in the gentle sway of the Japanese night.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Women

“He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate,”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“As it turned out, the Barbadian was never brought to trial. He succumbed in his jail cell some two months later, not from the effects of the acid he’d ingurgitated, but of a hunger strike. Billy Weston told me that Carleton couldn’t have been more than a hundred-forty or -fifty pounds, and that he’d lost nearly half of that weight by the time of his death. From the moment he raised that shingling hatchet, nothing passed his lips but water. Nor did he talk. Strange man, stranger fate.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“This brings to mind the story of one of the many civil cases in which Wrieto-San was involved. The judge asked him his profession and he stated that he was an architect—in fact, the world’s greatest architect. “The greatest?” the judge echoed. “How can you make that claim?” “Well, Your Honor,” Wrieto-San replied, “I am under oath.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Wrieto-San’s mother was eighty-one when she came to Tokyo, where she was revered by everyone who came into contact with her. In Japan, unlike America, we honor the old for the passage of their years and the diachronic luxury of their thoughts. They are living artifacts and they are people, not abandoned husks to be shunted off to the purgatory of nursing home and hospice.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Despite his lifelong protestations to the contrary, I can’t imagine but that Wrieto-San for the most part welcomed publicity, as it got his name out before the public and fed his sense of self-importance. So too with Miriam. Perhaps—and this occurs to me just now—they chose each other in a flare of mutual flamboyance, each reflecting all the brighter off the other.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“The Mann Act, passed into law just five years earlier as a means of prosecuting pimps, panders, fancy men and macquereau who transported women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, would haunt Wrieto-San, as has been seen. Its intention was to combat the very real abuses of “white slavery,” in which young immigrant girls were approached with offers of employment (in many cases as they stepped off the boat from Ellis Island), only to find themselves opiated, locked away in a room and gang-raped, starved and brutalized till all sense of dignity and individuality was destroyed, after which they were sold into prostitution.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“But Wrieto-San was, if anything, a rugged individualist, a one-man, as we say, like the lone cowboy of the Wild West films. Personally, I like to think that it was the Japanese influence that inspired him to employ a circular design for his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum of New York.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Wrieto-San adopted the square as his symbol because he understood it to represent probity, solidity, the virtues of the foursquare, and, of course, it is testamentary to the rectilinear patterns of his early and middle work. In contradistinction, we Japanese believe the circle to be the ideal form, as it is perfectly harmonious, sans the sharp individual edges of the square.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Again, one wonders how Wrieto-San was able to come up with the financing to purchase materials and employ a cohort of some twenty-five masons, carpenters and laborers, many of whom had to be housed and fed on the premises. I can imagine him working his legendary charm, of course, and perhaps even trading off the sympathetic reaction to Mamah’s death as a wedge to separate friends, tradesmen and prospective clients alike from their resources, and yet still . . .”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Throughout his career, Wrieto-San made a point of arranging meetings in his studio, where he could feel both impregnable and masterful, rather like a tortoise encapsulated in a gilded shell.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“For Wrieto-San, every building at Taliesin was in a state of flux. When he accidentally set fire to the theater at Hillside one windy afternoon in the thirties (brush, kerosene, poor judgment), he took me aside with a wink and a nod and told me he’d been looking for an excuse to renovate the shoddy old thing for years.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Catherine “Kitty” Tobin Wright (1871-1959), Wrieto-San’s first wife. They married, against all sense and advice, when he was twenty-one and she just out of high school. The children—Lloyd, John, Catherine, David, Frances and Llewellyn—came in rapid succession, like plums dropping from a tree. By all accounts, Wrieto-San seemed bewildered by them. It is unlikely that he would have given much thought or consideration to Catherine’s pregnancies, beyond the obvious financial and architectural exigencies to which they gave rise.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“The roar of the engine, the startled looks on the faces of the cows, the clouds shredding overhead. He shrugged. “Apparently. But they’re educated people—at least he is. Very well-spoken for a Negro. Name’s Julius, I think it was. Or no, no: Julian. Julian something.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“And worse: they’d petitioned the sheriff to arrest her and Frank on a morals charge. A morals charge, for God’s sake. It was like something out of the Dark Ages. Or Salem. A Salem witch hunt.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“The Spring Green Weekly Home News was savage, inflammatory, labeling Frank and her “a menace to the morals of the community and an insult to every family therein,”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“has lost all sense of morality and religion and is damnably to be blamed—though he’d crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the fire like the rag it was. Damnably to be blamed. Why couldn’t they leave him alone to live his life as he saw fit? Who made the rules to contain him? Rules were for other people, ordinary people, people who had neither insight nor originality or any sense of the world but what they’d been force-fed by the Reverend Luccocks and their ilk.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“The house went silent. The night came down and lay across the roof like a presence out of the forest primeval that had once stood here, on this lot, while Indians beat their squaws and stripped the flesh from their enemies with knives of stone. He drew himself up. Leveled his eyes on her. “She’s my soul mate, Catherine. Can’t you understand that? My soul mate.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Lloyd left in mid-January, on a day so bleak and gray the sky might have been the lid of a coffin for all the light that shone through.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“But in any case—and the thought lifted her like a sweet fresh breeze blowing all the way across the sodden plains from the painted peaks of the Rockies—Mamah was no more. Let Colorado keep her. Let her preach free love to the ranch hands and lasso all the husbands in the state right out of their saddles. Let her be a cowgirl. Let her wither.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Ellen Key. ‘Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“We Japanese have a saying, Ame futte ji katamaru: the ground that is rained upon hardens.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“FOLLOWING WIRELESS RECEIVED FROM TOKIO TODAY
HOTEL STANDS UNDAMAGED AS MONUMENT OF YOUR
GENIUS HUNDREDS OF HOMELESS PROVIDED BY PERFECTLY
MAINTAINED SERVICE SIGNED OKURA IMPEHO137”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“What? What?” And his voice was there, in the dark, crackling with outrage, truth against the world: “On what authority? How do you know? Have you been there and back on a magic carpet? No, no: you listen to me. The Imperial Theater might have gone down, the Imperial Hospital, the Imperial University and all the thousand other buildings that trumpet the Emperor’s connection, but if there’s a structure standing in all that torn country it will be my hotel. And you can print it!”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Maybe this was the way it was out here in the country, everyone battened down to survive the interminable winter, all human hopes and joys and aspirations buried under a heap of quilts, to bed at dark and up with the cows.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“She lifted the glass to her lips, let the taste of the cold clear liquid—the taste of France, of civilization—soothe her throat and her nerves and her temper too. She didn’t bother to”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“She was a matchless beauty, elegant, brilliant, worldly, and if he’d seen nothing like her in Chicago, what must the hidalgos have thought of her out there under the open sky? He pictured her in the arms of a tall mustachioed figure in a sombrero, some sunburned hybrid of Tom Mix and Teddy Roosevelt, and felt the loss of her like a physical ache.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women

“Somehow they were both standing. His arm was round her shoulders and his hand—his hand—was unconsciously massaging the short thick sturdy hairs the seal had once worn in the polar sea to fight back the chill of the world. It was perfect.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Women