Molly Peacock · 416 pages
Rating: (865 votes)
“Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“The secret of marriage is thinking that your partner is better than yourself.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. It doesn't yield a product, like the results of an art, but is stops time, as making art does.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“Robert Phelps, a biographer of Colette, said about watching, 'Along with love and work, this is the third great salvation. For whenever someone is seriously watching, a form of lost innocence is restored. It will not last, but during those minutes his self-consciousness is relieved.' Noticing keeps you alive.”
― Molly Peacock, quote from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
“Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.”
― James Jones, quote from From Here to Eternity
“You know the old saying,” said Nick. “Keep your friends close and your enemies dead and buried in the basement.”
― quote from The Paladin Prophecy
“She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Woodlanders
“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m ill. I’m an epileptic—that’s my lot. It isn’t easy and it isn’t very enjoyable but this is what I’ve got to live with. This is who I am, and I don’t think I’m insane. I don’t think I should be locked up and I don’t think I need to be cured of it for my life to be good. But no one seems to agree with me on that, and I was hoping you’d be different, but apparently you think just the same as my family and my doctors and everyone else.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
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