Between the Lines

Prisms ... prove that even the whitest daylight lives packed with secret wild colors.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Allan Gurganus

But War Has Not Retired From Me

The colonel in charge of the battery wore his nut-brown uniform as if he had a grudge against it ... This fight was loud and ugly and waged by men who burped and drank and leered at your mother.  These are our heroes, I told you there, standing on the levee watching the cannon rock back in its carriage. ... I have retired from war but it has not retired from me.

A Separate Country
Robert Hicks

Coffee in the Mountains

"Coffee in the Mountains."

I read that phrase on a website recently and it just clicked with me. I wanted to save it.

Traveling Well

This blazing freedom to come and go on a whim and a wing.  For her it was a kind of hallucinogen. The drug must be administered haphazardly if it is to lead to a sense of the strangeness of the new place that breaks down all the carefully assembled bits and pieces that make up the person you thought you were.  In order to travel well, it is essential to be able to get seriously lost.  

She did this brilliantly. 

My Mother's Lovers
Christopher Hope

On Love

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Home

It's said that you can never go home again and it's true enough, of course.  But the opposite is also true.  You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.

Shantaram
Gregory Burns

What Folks Think They Want

I had learned that much from taking out curious visitors.  They wanted to find treasure upon beach, they wanted to see monsters, but they did not want to think about how and when those monsters lived.  It challenged their idea of the world too much. - pgs 281-282

Remarkable Creatures
Tracy Chevalier

Eccentric, Languid Thoughts

"When people encountered them years later ... there was an aura about them.  You could not put your finger on it, but you knew these women shared secret lagoons of knowledge.  Secret codes and lore and lingo stretching back into that fluid time before air conditioning dried up the rich, heavy humidity that used to hang over the porches... drenching cotton blouses, beads of sweat tickling the skin, slowing people down so the world entered them in an unhurried way.  A thick stew of life that seeped into the very blood of people, so that eccentric, languid thoughts simmered inside.  Thoughts that would not come again after porches were enclosed, after the climate was controlled, after all windows were shut tight, and the sounds of the neighborhood were drowned out by the noise of the television set.

...

But Sidda was tired of being vigilant, alert, sharp.  She longed for porch friendship, ... the unplanned improvisational laziness.  She wanted to soak the words time management out of her lexicon.  She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down into the uncharted beautiful fertile, musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell."

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood 
Rebecca Wells

Reality and Life

Indeed, it is not all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk and immensity to reflect upon... Sometimes in the midst of his work... his reason... would revolt. All that had happened to him would appear impossible. He would say to himself: "It is a dream."

Les Miserables 

Victor Hugo

 

Things That Are Beyond Forgetable

We all knew what horse he would ride ... No man who sat him once could ever forget him.  Now when the trail is a lost occupation, and reverie and reminiscence carry the mind back to that day, there are friends and faces that may be forgotten, but there are horses that never will be.  pg. 81

The Log of a Cowboy 
Andy Adams