V.C. Andrews
Books published under the following names - Virginia Andrews, V. Andrews, Virginia C. Andrews & V.C. Endrius. Books since her death ghost written by Andrew Neiderman, but still attributed to the V.C. Andrews name
Virginia Cleo Andrews (born Cleo Virginia Andrews) was born June 6, 1923 in Portsmouth, Virginia. The youngest child and the only daughter of William Henry Andrews, a career navy man who opened a tool-and-die business after retirement, and Lillian Lilnora Parker Andrews, a telephone operator. She spent her happy childhood years in Portsmouth, Virginia, living briefly in Rochester, New York. The Andrews family returned to Portsmouth while Virginia was in high school.
While a teenager, Virginia suffered a tragic accident, falling down the stairs at her school and incurred severe back injuries. Arthritis and a failed spinal surgical procedure forced her to spend most of her life on crutches or in a wheelchair.
Virginia excelled in school and, at fifteen, won a scholarship for writing a parody of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. She proudly earned her diploma from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth. After graduation, she nurtured her artistic talent by completing a four-year correspondence art course while living at home with her family.
After William Andrews died in the late 1960s, Virginia helped to support herself and her mother through her extremely successful career as a commercial artist, portrait painter, and fashion illustrator.
Frustrated with the lack of creative satisfaction that her work provided, Virginia sought creative release through writing, which she did in secret. In 1972, she completed her first novel, The Gods of the Green Mountain [sic], a science-fantasy story. It was never published. Between 1972 and 1979, she wrote nine novels and twenty short stories, of which only one was published. "I Slept with My Uncle on My Wedding Night", a short fiction piece, was published in a pulp confession magazine.
Promise gleamed over the horizon for Virginia when she submitted a 290,000-word novel, The Obsessed, to a publishing company. She was told that the story had potential, but needed to be trimmed and spiced up a bit. She drafted a new outline in a single night and added "unspeakable things my mother didn't want me to write about." The ninety-eight-page revision was re-titled Flowers in the Attic and she was paid a $7,500 advance. Her new-generation Gothic novel reached the bestseller lists a mere two weeks after its 1979 paperback publication by Pocket Books.
Petals on the Wind, her sequel to Flowers, was published the next year, earning Virginia a $35,000 advance. The second book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for an unbelievable nineteen weeks (Flowers also returned to the list). These first two novels alone sold over seven million copies in only two years. The third novel of the Dollanganger series, If There Be Thorns, was released in 1981, bringing Virginia a $75,000 advance. It reached No. 2 on many bestseller lists within its first two weeks.
Taking a break from the chronicles of Chris and Cathy Dollanganger, Virginia published her one, and only, stand-alone novel, My Sweet Audrina, in 1982. The book welcomed an immediate success, topping the sales figures of her previous novels. Two years later, a fourth Dollanganger novel was released, Seeds of Yesterday. According to the New York Times, Seeds was the best-selling fiction paperback novel of 1984. Also in 1984, V.C. Andrews was named "Professional Woman of the Year" by the city of Norfolk, Virginia.
Upon Andrews's death in 1986, two final novels—Garden of Shadows and Fallen Hearts—were published. These two novels are considered the last to bear the "V.C. Andrews" name and to be almost completely written by
“You know what I miss the most about my youth? My gullibility. It's nice believing in everything and everyone. It makes you feel secure, but be strong and depend more on yourself and you'll be ready for disappointments. That's the best advice I can offer you.”
“Love is fragile at best and often a burden or something that blinds us. It's fodder for poets and song writers and they build it into something beyond human capacity. Falling in love means enrolling yourself in the school of disappointment. Being human means failing each other often, and no two people fail each other more than two people who pledge to do things for each other that they'll never do because they are just incapable of it...That's why art is enduring. The look of love or hope, or the look of compassion, bravery, whatever, is captured forever. We spend our lives trying to get someone to be as enduring as a painting or a sculpture and we can't because feelings crumble as quickly as the flesh.”
“Patience. I colored patience gray, hung over with black clouds. I colored hope yellow, just like the sun we could see for a few short morning hours. Too soon the sun rose high in the sky & disappeared from view, leaving us bereft and staring at blue.”
“Love … I put so much faith in it. Truth … I kept believing it falls always from the lips of the one you love and trust the most. Faith … it’s all bound up to love and trust. Where does one end and the other start, and how do you tell when love is the blindest of all?”
“People never really died. They only went on to a better place, to wait a while for their loved ones to join them. And then once more they went back to the world, in the same way they had arrived the first time around.”
“And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where i pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, i saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard i sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where i could feel them protective about me, supporting me ... and with him i'd find, at last, a safe place to live and love.”
“I am a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she'd have a man to take care of her.”
“I had a gift too; not the bright and shining coin that was Christopher's. It was my way to turn over all that glittered and look for the tarnish.”
“Life offers more than one chance, Cathy, you know that.”
“I watched the jealousy between them grow, and felt it was none of my fault--only Momma's! As everything wrong in my life was her fault.”
“After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memorizing, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, you still feel inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding.”
“It's funny how when you're little, you miss all the little lies. They float right past you, but you don't wonder about them much. For a long time, you think this is just something adults still do after being kids - pretend. Then one day you wake up and realize most of the world you're in is built on someone's make-believe.”
“Love doesn't always come when you want it to. Sometimes it just happens, despite your will.”
“Love, when it came and knocked on my door, was going to be enough.”-”
“Love, when it came and knocked on my door, was going to be enough.And that unknown author who'd written that if you had fame, it was not enough, and if you had wealth as well, it was still not enough, and if you had fame, wealth, and also love ... still it was not enough - boy, did I feel sorry for him.”
“At the end of the rainbow waited the pot of gold. But rainbows were made of faint and fragile gossamer-and gold weighed a ton-and since the world began, gold was the reason to do most anything.”
“He won't listen to the music, and I can't turn it off.”
“The part that Sahsa moved into Alena's bedroom and slleps in Alena's bed and uses her belongings.But there is someone else who don't like the idea that someone is useing her sister's room and her stuff .So she tries to make sure that Sahsa never takes her sister's place and is jealous so she plans on making Sahsa'a Life A Living Hell.”
“Dreams, I thought. They're the riches of a poor person, stashed in treasure chests buried deeply in the imagination. But are dreams enough?”
“...for everything can come to those who have the desire,the drive, the dedication, and the determination." v.c.andrews”
“The creative genius begins in the idle moment, dreaming up the impossible, and later making it come true.”
“I wish the night would end,I wish the day'd begin,I wish it would rain or snow,or the wind would blow,or the grass would grow,I wish I had yesterday,I wish there were games to play...”
“A flower blooms best in a happy pot.”
“Only someone who had cried a great deal understands why someone else wants to stop the tears.”
“We lived in the attic,Christopher, Cory, Carrie, and me,Now there are only three.”
“The weight of the lie was so great it almost didn't escape my lips and barely made it to her ears”
“I never realized that the blue sky I saw was not the soft, nurturing sky of spring, but the cold, chilling, lonely sky of winter”
“Something creaked beneath me! A soft step on rotting wood! I jumped startled, scared, and turned, expecting to see-God knows what! Then I sighed, for it was only Chris standing in the gloom, silently staring at me. Why? Did I look prettier than usual? Was it the moonlight, shining through my airy clothes? All random doubts were cleared when he said in a voicegritty and low, "You look beautiful sitting there like that." Hecleared the frog in his throat. "The moonlight is etching you with silver-blue, and I can see the shape of your body throughyour clothes." Then, bewilderingly, he seized me by the shoulders, diggingin his fingers, hard! They hurt. "Damn you, Cathy! You kissedthat man! He could have awakened and seen you, and demandedto know who you were! And not thought you only a part of hisdream!" Scary the way he acted, the fright I felt for no reason at all. "How do you know what I did? You weren't there; you weresick that night." He shook me, glaring his eyes, and again I thought he seemed a stranger. "He saw you, Cathy-he wasn't soundly asleep!" "He saw me?" I cried, disbelieving. It wasn't possible . . .wasn't! "Yes!" he yelled. This was Chris, who was usually in such control of his emotions. "He thought you a part of his dream!But don't you know Momma can guess who it was, just by putting two and two together-just as I have? Damn you and your romantic notions! Now they're on to us! They won't leave money casually about as they did before. He's counting, she's counting, and we don't have enough-not yet!" He yanked me down from the widow sill! He appeared wild and furious enough to slap my face-and not once in all our lives had he ever struck me, though I'd given him reason to when I was younger. But he shook me until my eyes rolled, until I was dizzy and crying out: "Stop! Momma knows we can't passthrough a looked door!" This wasn't Chris . . . this was someone I'd never seen before . . . primitive, savage. He yelled out something like, "You're mine, Cathy! Mine!You'll always be mine! No matter who comes into your future, you'll always belong to me! I'll make you mine . . . tonight . . .now!" I didn't believe it, not Chris! And I did not fully understand what he had in mind, nor, if I am to give him credit, do I think he really meant what he said, but passion has a way of taking over. We fell to the floor, both of us. I tried to fight him off. We wrestled, turning over and over, writhing, silent, a frantic strug-gle of his strength against mine. It wasn't much of a battle. I had the strong dancer's legs; he had the biceps, the greater weight and height . . . and he had much more determination than i to use something hot, swollen and demanding, so much it stile reasoning and sanity from him. And I loved him. I wanted what he wanted-if he wanted it that much, right and wrong. Somehow we ended up on that old mattress-that filthy, smelly, stained mattress that must have known lovers long before this night. And that is where he took me, and forced inthat swollen, rigid male sex part of him that had to be satisfied. It drove into my tight and resisting flesh which tore and bled.Now we had done what we both swore we'd never do.”
“Maybe thats because we take criticism best from those we love and those who love us-Ethan”
“Unless i'm reading an assignment or doing a paper or taking a test, i'm thinking about you.”
“love, is an unnatural attachment to another living thing. it's the root cause of most personal problems people have.”
“Love, in short is the most dangerous emotion human can experience”
“It was the eyes. The secret of love was in the eyes. The way one person looked at another, the way eyes communicated and spoke when the lips never moved.”
“Love, how often that word came up in books over and over again. If you had wealth and health, and beauty and talent...you had nothing if you didn't have love. Love changed all that was ordinary into something giddy, powerful, drunken, enchanted.”
“My thoughts took frantic flight, wanting to escape this prison, and seek out the wind so it could fan my hair and sting my skin, and make me feel alive again.”
“Promises are lies wrapped in pretty ribbons -Cinnamon”
“Little rabbits have big ears.”
“I believe in God... but I don't believe in religion. Religion is used to manipulate and punish. Used in a thousand ways for profit for even in the church, money is still the 'real' God.”
“Life is like that - twenty minutes of misery for every two seconds of joy.”
“You are the most dangerous kind of female the world can ever know. You carry the seeds for your own destruction and the destruction of everyone who loves you. And a great many will love you for your beautiful face for your seductive body; but you will fail them all because you will believe they all fail you first. You are an idealist of the worst kind - the romantic idealist. Born to destroy and self destruct.”
“Seek the tarnish and you shall find”
“You can trust a few some of the time, and most none of the time. Feel lucky if you have even one to trust all of the time.”
“What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different.”