No matter how much restitution she paid with every word and deed, her blood-stained hands could never really be clean, even if no one else knew they were dirty.
She knew him in that way you can only know a person as a child. Like if you cracked away the adult shell, you'd find that child, happily sitting inside, smiling at you.
I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.
She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.
I don't have a love life. I have a like life.' Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...
No sky Leila had seen before could compare to the beauty she was seeing above her. It didn't feel like some accident of nature but rather something that was purposefully unleashed on the world.
Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?
He barred his forearm across Marco's brawny chest and shoved him against the stone door. "She may not be mine, but I am still hers.
A woman keeps to home and family, and tends to matters inside the home. A man keeps to war games and tends to matters outside." A queen tends to both, I wanted to say, but did not. She would not understand.
...every now and then I watched him beam at Olivia. He obviously adored her. And I realized that meeting her father made me look at Olivia differently. She was somebody's little girl.
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
You’re hurt.” “No. No, I’m fine. It’s not blood. The militiamen were adjusting Sir Lewis’s trebuchet, and there was a mishap. You took a melon for me.” She smiled, even though her lips trembled.
A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.
She was pretty sure Seth had practiced all his facial expressions and gestures in front of a mirror, and worked out which ones made him look like a cross between an Abercrombie model and a kitten.
She started dialing his cell, then hung up and tried the landline -- maybe Margaret was a better bet to pick up; their parents' generation still felt morally obligated to answer phones.
I am an equation that only she solves, These X's and Y's by other names called, My way of division is desperatley flawed, while I multiply days without her.
She screamed, the high scream that was neither human nor animal but something terrible in between, the sort of sound that you never forget no matter how many beautiful things you hear afterward.
The white lily stands for purity. Artists for centuries have pictured the angel Gabriel coming to the virgin Mary with a spray of lillies in his hand, to announce that she is to be the mother of the Turks.
From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.
Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
She hugged me and I could feel the heat rise in my face, either from shame or love, like there was a difference.
