Josephine Humphreys

“Like most good looking women, she was never sure of her beauty, and had to keep checking on it, to make sure it was still there.”

“When people say they are happy for you it may mean they are sad for themselves.”

“Revenge! The stupidest motive on earth, just an attempt to change history.”

“But the moods could be contagious. He didn't need one right now.”

“He was in a state of wonder most of the time, the way a young boy is--engaged by the most ordinary things as if they were great miracles.”

“I'm not sure whether or not any love matches are made in heaven, but some do suggest heaven had a hand in the introductions.”

“I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see.”

“People Should not be protected from the world.. -It cripples them.”

“You know a relationship has deteriorated past the point of salvage when one person detests another's gestures.”

“If she were their mother she'd teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she'd teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference...”

“Well, I mean I have forgotten how to go anywhere alone. There are things you have to do. Like throw money into a toll basket on a highway. I'd pull up to it now and panic. Or what if I had to hail a cab? It's hard to believe, but I used to be able to do things when I was twenty that are impossible now [...] It's more than the physical task. It's ...a vision of yourself. If you don't see yourself as being able to do it, then you can't, no matter how easy it is.”

“He's always had a nameless, unanchored longing; and when, at critical points in his life, a period of intense longing coincided with the appearance of a suitable object, he fell for it head over heels, and believed he had discovered a great passion. Poetry, friendship, work, women - each at one time he'd held to be the center of his life. But since the origin of his passion was internal, the chosen objects couldn't hold him long; and he had to feed his yearning with yet more loss. The deepening spiral could not end well for him...”

“It isn't that nothing is left. It is that what remains is such an old sad ghost of the thing that used to be, and he can't bear lying down with the vestiges.”

“You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.”

“They sounded frantic; he imagined them driven into the night by a force stronger than hunger or love, flying blind, scared stiff but having no choice in the matter.”

“Still, he's Emory. He doesn't have to walk her home, especially considering how snitty she was to him. He didn't have to come in and stop her cruelty to Fay, or watch over her as he has evidently been continuing to do, drawing those pictures on the Reeses' sidewalk. She knew the pictures were for her and her children. She and Emory did not always spell things out, but she knew, when he drew pictures, what they meant.”

“Why do philosophers in the South so often end as newspapermen, poets as doctors? Maybe they crave what's found in pain and loss: a sense of living among other human beings. They'll give up dreams for that.”

“But Iris walks through the project every day. Alice asked, "Isn't it dangerous?" Iris said, "I don't know. I guess it could be, if you're afraid. I'm not because it's just something I've always done. I mean, if you live in it you aren't scared of it.”

“Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time?”

“He longed for a heart like the one his friend was getting, an unstoppable pump that would not falter. Danny might appear to be in trouble, but he never really is, he has this secret strength. Now, though he's lost fifty thousand dollars in a golf-course scheme and his ex-wife is suing him and he lives without furniture, these are minor details. The man is complete. Self-destructive to some extent, but whole enough to take it.”

“Her body was heavy and tired, and she thought, I can't carry myself another step into this life.”

“That was one helpful thing he said to her, the first thing that caught her attention. "Start your life." Because she had assumed that her life was over.”

“She knew what she looked like - someone at the edge of catastrophe, someone already flinching from a blow that had not yet been delivered.”

“The shape of his head, the set of his shoulders are a pattern she could recognize and love out of a crowd of shadows.”

“It dawned on him that the loneliness of marriage, the thing Alice had so feared, starts out of love itself, which can never deliver on its promises.”

“Marry me,' he said. [...]'No,' she said. 'It scares me.' [...] 'What aspect of it scares you?' 'The loneliness.”

“People do sometimes change, of course. Habits, allegiances, dreams are all alterable, but only under extraordinary pressure - like great love, fear, grief. More often, people don't change. A girl who never missed a day of work does not suddenly decide to stay home in bed, for no good reason.”

“Nineteen and living a life not his own, he was sure enough of his worth to put his name to his work and let it stand for him. Did not even have a wife yet, according to Queen, so it was not love that set him to cutting the pine, but a trust and a longing.”

“She used to be a mathematician. Now she looks for omens and signs. At one time she thought math would clarify the world for her. She knew her link to real things was weak [...] She had hoped knowledge of mathematics, the world's rules, might strengthen her hold. But it did not. The world turned opaque and medieval, its every event mysterious. Now she uses a private mathematics, one made from omens and signs and dreams.”

“Oh, the world appears to work smoothly enough, like a toy town where the only business is the constant shifting of goods and wastes. If that were all, how easy to live - buy your food, put out the garbage. But the toys and models and dolls and the world's looks are treacherous. They teach children it will be easy. The real problem of consumption and disposal are nothing like what children are led to suspect.”

“Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.”