Anne Rivers Siddons

“Нека има пролуки във вашата близост.”

“...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...”

“Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia.”

“Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.”

“The very old can tell you about peace. They have fought through the black, sinking, visceral knowledge of death–their own death–that heralds middle age and come to the place where childhood meets them once more, and with it that ineffable treasure that only the very young and old know: the tranquility of the moment. The contentment of living each day as it comes to them, wholly and with all senses. The young do it because they know nothing, yet, of pain and fear and the transience of their lives; the old because they know everything of those things and can bear them only by staying in the moment. Carpe diem> may be the sum of all the world's wisdom. I have always thought Horace must have been old when he wrote it.”

“Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.”

“Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”

“Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”

“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.”

“Everything about it and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep buried wildness in my heart.”

“At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long.”

“It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.”

“Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky...”

“...against the grape-flushed sky perfect amethyst night.”

“The sunset over the bay that evening was a conflagration of blood-red and orange and deep, gold-edged purple. I remember: unforgettable.”

“...bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.”

“On a night of icy silver radiance, when the very sea and stars seemed on fire with light.”

“The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.”

“Her light brown eyes were the color of sherry, fringed with long, thick, gold-tipped lashes.”

“That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness...”

“Sometimes I could scarcely breathe with the knowledge that for the rest of my life, whenever we wanted, Peter and I could lie down and do whatever we wished.”

“I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mornings, and the old kitchen around me, and Aurelia's gold smile and quick hands and eyes rich with love for me.”

“Peter and I danced in bare feet in the cold wet undergrowth while the moon poured its wild old silver down on us and the water ran black and ancient and the moss shone.”

“I fell in love with Peter at that precise instant. I don't suppose many other women know the exact moment the rest of their lives began.”

“All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

“(voice)...it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth.”

“Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.”

“...and turned his eyes the color of a winter sea.”

“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.”

“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'.”

“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.”

“Yancey crawled from her tangled bed one morning and assembled her long limbs and sharp bones into something as exotic and seductive to the eye as a peacock or a griffin or a unicorn.”

“...and I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper.”

“The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.”

“Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.”

“Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.”

“You wouldn't maintain a house like that' you'd feet it and water it. You'd have to give it nourishment and love it to keep it alive and healthy.”