“I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“Such nights are possible, and we survive them. It is a matter of sleeping next to the adored body you no longer have the right or inclination to love. Whether you are the one who casts off, or are the cast of yourself; whether your arms are the recoilers, or the ones that reach wantingly, then pull back, remembering they are no longer wanted. Two bodies that are used to each other's rhythms and sleep sounds, that know the turnings and breathings, know not to worry about that cough or that brief garbled grunt, that wildly flung arm or that stone-cold foot. Bodies that soon will not know each other's night selves: will touch each other through jackets and jeans and the cooled-down air of reestablished acquaintance, if such a thing is possible between a given pair of ex-lovers.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“It could not always be love in the afternoon and passion in the night, gifts given, notes written, meals fed to each other. It can't all be like that.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“This was another item about growing up: you encountered all the cliches of love and loss and heartbreak.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn't just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“Don;t blush, for God's sake. You and your blushing - you're like some Victorian maiden.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“She'd have to start smoking. There would be no other way through this.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“He did not know what it was like to be two women in love.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“I'd like to pay your palms the same favor that you pay these pages, searching them for grooves and images and the secret signs of hunger, as you may scan these words for hidden messages. The lines of your hand might be a guide to your gifts for pleasure, or a clue to where you'll take me, or a map of where I might take you.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“People are cruel, and they will do anything.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“You know, babe." Her voice had an older woman's weary advice in it. "You're so hungry. You want so much."
"Well." Flannery shrugged. "So what? I'll never get it."
"You might. If you stop asking."
"I'll never stop asking."
"I know." Anne touched her cheek. "It's one of the things that makes you strangely lovable.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o’clock.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“We will never be together. Sweetheart. I am too brittle, hidden, and snappish, and you are too married. You are altogether too married.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“He wants me back." The closing punctuation of "obviously" hung in the air. The confidence in her! Anne would always have it: the certainty that there would be a trail of people following her, wanting her love and her beauty. Flannery saw that confidence, and through the polluted air now between them it no longer charmed her. Not tonight it didn't. Flannery was not inclined to be one of that number.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“How could Flannery be so old and still not know herself? For this seventeen-year-old did feel old. Those private years of intense adolescent reading and music-fueled writing in her journal had made her sure she was full of maturity—of a certain unusual, and in its way impressive, emotional self-assurance. She had an alert awareness of what people were like. She’d talked two of her high-school friends through the loss of their virginity, even as she’d held on easily to her own.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“Once Flannery found it, she couldn’t stop wanting that pleasure, enjoying the sound of her own short breaths in the quiet night air. More. Over. Again. She had to make up for lost years.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
Sylvia Brownrigg
Born place: in Mountain View, California, The United States
Born date December 16, 1964
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“Life wasn't too bad. The trouble with Man was, even while he was having a good time, he didn't appreciate it. Why, thought Milligan, this very moment might be the happiest in me life. The very thought of it made him miserable.”
― Spike Milligan, quote from Puckoon
“Everyone should have someone that cares.Someone that doesn't give up on them.Someone to always care what they're doing.Right at this moment,I make it my goal to be that someone for Park.”
― Cheryl McIntyre, quote from Before Now
“For Blitz, meanwhile, an almost tragic dilemma had begun. As time passed, he and Giuseppe understood each other better and better, conversing and playing together on the floor with immense amusement, and so he found himself madly in love also with Giuseppe, as well as Nino. But Nino was always out, and Giuseppe always at home: thus it was impossible for him to live constantly in the company of both his loves, as he would have wished. And in consequence, with either one, he was always tortured by regret: and if he was with one, the mere mention of the others name or a smell that recalled him was enough for his homesickness to stream behind him, like a banner against the wind. At times, while he was on sentry duty outside Ninos school, suddenly, as if at a message brought him by a cloud, he would begin to sniff the sky with a mournful whimper, recalling the incarcerated Giuseppe. For a few minutes, a dissension would rend him, drawing him in two opposite directions at the same time; but finally, having overcome his hesitation, he would dash toward the San Lorenzo house, his long nose cleaving the wind like a prow. But at his destination, unfortunately, he found the door barred; and all his cries, mortified by the muzzle, passionately calling for Giuseppe, were in vain; for Giuseppe, though hearing him and suffering in his solitary room, longing to let him in, was unable to do so. Then, resigning himself to his destiny of waiting outside doors, Blitz would stretch out there on the ground, where, at times, in his boundless patience, he would doze off. And perhaps he had a dream of love, which brought him a reminiscence of Nino: it's a fact that, a moment later, he would stir from his sleep and hop down the steps with desperate whimpers, to retrace his way to the school.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History
“Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo
“Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
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