“If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.”
“Fear is the original sin. Almost all of the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.It is a cold slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.”
“It was three o'clock in the morning – the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock. But sometimes it sets us free.”
“Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.”
“Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.”
“Love you! Girl, you're in the very core of my heart. I hold you there like a jewel. Didn't I promise you I'd never tell you a lie? Love you! I love you with all there is of me to love. Heart, soul, brain. Every fibre of body and spirit thrilling to the sweetness of you. There's nobody in the world for me but you, Valancy.”
“There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. YOU think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbreakable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - THAT'S a bondage.”
“That's all the freedom we can hope for - the freedom to choose our prison.”
“We don't know where we're going, but isn't is fun to go?”
“Just to love! She did not ask to be loved. It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.”
“The greatest happiness [...] is to sneeze when you want to.”
“Despair is a free man—hope is a slave.”
“I'm glad I never had any children,' said Cousin Sarah. 'If they don't break your heart in one way they do it in another.'
'Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?' queried Valancy. 'Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.”
“The trouble with you people is that you don't laugh enough.”
“Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way yet—never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man. Ay, there lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellignton or an Uncle Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid.”
“But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder.”
“The only thing you can be sure of in this world is the multiplication table.”
“[she] had a great reputation for unselfishness because she was always giving up a lot of things she didn't want.”
“What a spineless thing I must be not to have one enemy!”
“Most things are predestined, but some are just darn sheer luck, said Roaring Abel.”
“Fear is the original sin,” suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy’s consciousness. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”
Valancy stood up. She was still in the clutches of fear, but her soul was her own again. She would not be false to that inner voice.”
“You forget, Moonlight, that there are different kinds of beauty. Your imagination is obsessed by the very obvious type of your cousin Olive. Oh, I've seen her—she's a stunner—but you'd never catch Allan Tierney wanting to paint her. In the horrible but expressive slang phrase, she keeps all her goods in the shop-window. But in your subconscious mind you have a conviction that nobody can be beautiful who doesn't look like Olive. Also, you remember your face as it was in the days when your soul was not allowed to shine through it.”
“I have really done so few bad things that they have to keep harping on the old ones [.]”
“When he said good evening you felt that it was a good evening and that it was partly his doing that it was.”
“She had always envied the wind. So free. Blowing where it listed. Through the hills. Over the lakes. What a tang, what a zip it had! What a magic of adventure!”
“One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.”
“It never rains but it pours”
“Thirty seconds can be very long sometimes. Long enough to work a miracle or a revolution.”
“I recall thinking that I was stroking toward either the end of all life or the beginning of a new one. Neither possibility stirred me. Every man knows he will die; and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of sane being. I wasn't able to credit my own non-existence any better than the next man; what I had lost was a healthy abhorrence of the state. It had not dropped from me because of any particular shock or misfortune. It had moulted from me year by year, for all of my thirty-five, to leave me naked in apathy.”
“Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned-you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew-no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.”
“Glitter is like….little flecks of brilliance caught in a tube.”
“There would never be anything but this. Stolen moments, stolen kisses, a secret oasis.”
“I'd learned balance is internal; that there really wasn’t one set formula for how to live your life nor how to handle the wife-mother-businesswoman juggling act. Maybe it was just being tuned in to every role and knowing when one or the other needed to be the focus.”
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