“I didn't know how to live my life, and suddenly I was thrust into it and had no choice but to live it.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“She hadn't meant to do it. Falling this crashingly in love with Spencer didn't take Lily by accident. It took her by storm.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“Everyone wishes their life were happier.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Not like beautiful people. They walk this earth, their chin up to the rest of us, and think that great happiness, great love, great joy is their right and their prerogative. Passion as the entitlement of the beautiful, the way power is the entitlement of the rich.” Lily paused. “Especially when it comes to love. Beauty and love become somehow synonymous. How can plain people have great love? They can’t, that’s how. They can have average love, mediocre love, but their hearts can’t soar. Only beautiful hearts can soar.”
“I think you’ve hit on the nail right there,” said Spencer. “Beautiful people don’t necessarily have beautiful hearts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? You don’t fall in love with a heart. You fall in love with a woman’s face, with her body, with her hair, with her smell. That’s first, everything else is secondary. My mother’s beauty when she was young was so extreme that she didn’t understand how every man who met her didn’t love her in extremis.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“...But I’m telling you, something happens to beautiful people. They think that something extra is owed to them by life, by God, by all the people around them. They think their life has to be better, more dramatic, happier—in color, not black and white.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“Daughters are supposed to be friends to their mothers in their old age.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“To lead a life so wholly happy, so wholly unexamined that she could be dying, could be betrayed, could be besieged on all sides and never even know it.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“Sanchez got the phone call, listened carefully, glanced over at Spencer, in Whittaker's office, having his morning coffee. Hung up the phone, got up, went and knocked on the door, asked if he could see Spencer a moment, and lowering his voice said, "Carl downstairs just called me because someone wants to file a vagrancy report.
Spencer slapped him on the back. "Detective Sanchez, thank you for bringing the particulars of your job description to my attention. Well done. Go to it.
Sanchez hemmed and said, "The young woman says she is Lily Quinn. Specifically asked for me, Carl says.
Spencer didn't slap him on the back this time. He stared at Carl and then said, "All right smart-ass, go back to you desk.
"That's what I thought," said Sanchez.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
“Simply, this is what she believed: she believed that the universe showed each of us certain things, that it made certain things open.
Many people lived a peace life with nothing ever happening to them. But into some families other things fell. Some families were afflicted with random tragedies - car accidents, plane accidents, hang gliding accidents, bus crashes, knifing, drownings, scarves getting caught under the wheels of their Rolls Royces, breaking their necks.”
― Paullina Simons, quote from The Girl In Times Square
Paullina Simons
Born place: Leningrad, Russian Federation
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“All my girlhood I always planned to do something big…something constructive. It’s queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura…now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung.”
“But you’ve done lots of things, Grandma. You’ve baked bread…and pieced quilts…and taken care of your children.”
Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl’s hand. “Well…well…out of the mouths of babes. That’s just it, Laura, I’ve only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don’t they?...But I’ve dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children…and the children are carrying them out...doing all the things I wanted to and couldn’t.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, quote from A Lantern in Her Hand
“With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.”
― Jack London, quote from The Call of the Wild/White Fang
“Your woman wears underwear out in public,”
Sabin said. “Must be nice. How’d you manage that
little miracle?”
“Only the Deity knows.”
― Gena Showalter, quote from The Darkest Surrender
“This would be so goddamn much easier if I weren’t human,” she said. “Think about it. If I weren’t human, why the hell would I care whether you got raped?”
― Octavia E. Butler, quote from Lilith's Brood
“Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.”
― Alice Walker, quote from The Temple of My Familiar
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