“After living at sea for twenty years or more, the female loggerhead returns to the beach of her birth to nest. She travels hundreds of miles through the Atlantic, her three-hundred-pound, eddish-brown carapace filled with hundreds of fertile eggs.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“But strength without flexibility makes one hard. Come September, when those fierce winds blow in from the sea, those hardwoods crack, splinter and fall. But the pliant palms are resilient and they bend with the wind. This is the secret of a Southern woman. Strength, resilience and beauty. We are never hard.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“A woman’s life has so many demands because she is the axis around which so many little planets spin.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“Consider the turtle. Perchance you have worried, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seem rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with the turtle’s pace. The young turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience and learns the way of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fail. French empires rise or fall, but the turtle is developed only so fast. What’s a summer? Time for a turtle’s egg to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. They have no worries, have no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as much as for you? —Henry David Thoreau Journal August 28, 1856”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“It was chilling to wake up at forty years of age to find she had no friends, no interests and no investments in anything unconnected to her work.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“loggerhead. 1. Latin: Caretta caretta. A tropical sea turtle with a hard shell and a large head. 2. a stupid fellow; blockhead. 3. at loggerheads; in disagreement; in a quarrel.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“Stop what you’re doing and observe your children! Lovie wanted to say to the young mother. Quick, set aside your chores and turn your head. See how they laugh with such abandon? Only the very young can laugh like that. Look how they are giving you clues to who they are.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“worry about you, Caretta. You are a strong woman, true enough. But strength without flexibility makes one hard. Come September, when those fierce winds blow in from the sea, those hardwoods crack, splinter and fall. But the pliant palms are resilient and they bend with the wind. This is the secret of a Southern woman. Strength, resilience and beauty. We are never hard.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“love was never a sin. Not loving, now that was the very worst kind of sin,”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“But now her children were grown-up and she felt every inch of the distance between them, stretching further over the years.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“She was nearly seventy years old. There was no time left for regret or misgivings, no time for dreams of what might have been.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“Please, Lord, answer this one small prayer. Not just for me, but for Cara. Help me play with my child once more before I die. Bring my Cara home.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“, no time for dreams of what might have been. There were plans to be made. The beach house —and all the secrets it held— had to be placed in secure hands. Too much had been sacrificed for too many years to let the secrets slip out now. Too many reputations were at stake. She had but one hope. “Lord,” she prayed, her voice raspy in her tight throat. “I’m not here to complain. You know me better than that after all this time. But the Bible says You never close a door without opening a window. So I’m praying for You to open the window. You know how things are between Cara and me. It will probably take a miracle to make”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“Lovie stood alone gazing toward the west. The day’s light extinguished and the night grew dark and silent save for the clicking of the swaying sea oats and the gentle lapping of waves along the shore. As ghosts of the past rose up to swirl in the hallucinatory colors of twilight, she sighed deeply, clasping her hands tight in front of her as one in prayer. She was nearly seventy years old. There was no time left for regret or misgivings, no time for dreams of what might have been. There were plans to be made. The beach house—and all the secrets it held—had to be placed in secure hands. Too much had been sacrificed for too many years to let the secrets slip out now. Too many reputations were at stake.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
“Why didn’t you tell me? It’s all such a complicated mess.” “Most lives are if you live long enough, my darling.” “I’ve”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
Mary Alice Monroe
Born place: Evanston, The United States
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“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Joan of Arc
“I had never seen a woman's breasts before, and I doubted if any seven-year-old boy in Craighead County had. Maybe some kid had stumbled upon his mother, but I was certain no boy my age had never had this view.”
― John Grisham, quote from A Painted House
“...I want to grab her collarbones as if they were handlebars.”
― Joe Dunthorne, quote from Submarine
“What has been done to you is one thing. Yet to really suffer, to truly be burdened with guilt and shame, such pain always begins not with what has been done to you—but with what you have done. André Chevalier”
― Nikki Sex, quote from Abuse
“What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have always expected to appear at the woods' edge, beckoning, I have always expected to be a great relisher of this world, its good grown immortal in his mind.”
― Wendell Berry, quote from The Collected Poems, 1957-1982
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Friday Night Lights:...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
