“If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic. Now he was going--out again into that great world with its bustle and noise and excitement--and she must stay here. She had a terrible new feeling of loneliness, as if she stood in some solitary corner at a party where she was the only stranger. Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“Death was democratic. It made no choice between the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the young and the old.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“Edward Progers was his Majesty’s Page of the Backstairs. He handled private money transactions, secret correspondence, and served in an ex-officio capacity as the King’s pimp. It was a position of no mean prestige, and of considerable activity.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“Her honey-coloured hair fell in heavy wavesbelow her shoulders and as she stared up at him her eyes, clear, speckled amber, seemed to tilt at the corners; her brows were black and swept up in arcs, and she had thick black lashesh. There was about her a kind of warm luxuriance, something immediately suggestive to the men of pleasurable fulfillment- something for which she was not responsible but of which she was acutely conscious.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“Now she looked as though he had trapped her. “Mon Dieu! What a question! What would you say if someone asked you, ‘Are you happy?’ I suppose I’m as happy as most people. No one is ever truly happy, do you think? If you get even half of what you want from life—” She gave a little shrug and gestured with one hand. “Why, that’s all one can hope for, isn’t it?” “And”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“I think I'll name her Amber - for the colour of her father's eyes.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“She had never seen anyone like him before in her life. The clothes he wore, the sound of his voice, the expression in his eys, all made her feel that she had had z moomentary glimpse into another world - and she longed passionately to see it again, if only for a brief while.”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
“once described fiction as a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it is to succeed. And that ring of truth invariably comes from research, which in turn gives a novel its authenticity. It is this kind of authenticity plus good storytelling that made Forever Amber a bestseller 56 years ago. Now”
― Kathleen Winsor, quote from Forever Amber
Kathleen Winsor
Born place: in Olivia, Minnesota, The United States
Born date October 16, 1919
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“Tashi dice que quiere enfrentarse al pelotón de fusilamiento vestida de rojo. Le recuerdo que su sentencia está siendo apelada. También cabe la esperanza de que los Estados Unidos hagan valer la ciudadanía norteamericana de Tashi. Es igual, quiero ir de rojo, dice, pase lo que pase. Estoy harta del blanco y el negro. Ninguno va primero. El rojo, el color de la sangre de mujer, los precede a ambos.
De modo que cosemos.”
― Alice Walker, quote from Possessing the Secret of Joy
“Why do we believe one stranger and not another?”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead
“How many neighbors ignoring Jolly for her ignorance and bad luck could go down on their knees and save their kid from choking to death this afternoon while the world was going on outside in the sunshine?”
― Virginia Euwer Wolff, quote from Make Lemonade
“If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]
Chill of Fear
Deal Breaker
The Silent Governess
Croak
Terra Nostra
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