The Second Mrs. Hockaday Quotes

“Our enemy is [. . .] and all people like him, who never question their motives or doubt their desires. They are put on this earth to cause misery, because what they take so freely for themselves comes always at great cost to others.”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

“(How Southern I am, in that respect: still fighting my war when the battles have been lost.)”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

“been trying to reassemble these memories—if they can rightly claim provenance as such—in some kind of intelligible order, which they resist. On one level, I recall very little from that time, because I was slow to talk and lived in a world without language. That world, however, was rich in impressions and sensitive to shifts in emotional temperature and intensity. I was like a little planet, or a moon, orbiting around the greater masses of the grown-ups, eclipsed by their shadows and heated by their brilliance, always attached and dependent.”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

“The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky, like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life. —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

“So much blood has been spilled that redemption may be out of reach, in the end. Maybe all we can hope for is to be so exhausted by hate that we settle for the ceremonies of reconciliation. But I see that the great enemy in this battle is not the abolitionist, the Yankee soldier with his repeating-gun and well-made boots, or the negro who drops his work and runs towards the first scrap of blue cloth he spies between the trees. Our enemy is Nolan Oglesby and all the people like him, who never question their motives or doubt their desires. They are put on this earth to cause misery, because what they take so freely for themselves comes always at great cost to others.”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday

“perceive that fear rushes into the spaces left when confidence flees, when a woman realizes that she is no longer a person of any particular importance or authority, as she had long been allowed to believe. It has tipped the balance of the world in an uncanny way.”
― Susan Rivers, The Second Mrs. Hockaday