If ever I am inclined in the future to disbelieve in love, I will remember this moment.
You can run away from your life and your past, but there’s no way to distance yourself from your own heart.
Now, darlin’, you know that social etiquette is bred into us Southern girls.” “Oh, please. You’re as Southern as Tony Soprano.” Mama sniffed. “I swear, I should have left you by the side of the road in Wheeling, West Virginia.” “You did leave me there.
Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother’s rose-scented perfume.
Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep. This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
A better mother would shape that anger into loss and then, at least, into the kind of memory of love one can sustain, but Vianne was too empty to be a good mother right now. She could think of no words that weren’t a lie or useless.
She gave herself over to the sensations of the kiss, let it become the whole of her universe, and knew finally how it felt to be enough for someone.
The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other.
This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Life changes, whether you want it to or not.
Sometime – she didn’t know when – she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in.
Sometimes you have to fight for the thing that will complete you.
Your dad cleared out our savings account. And they won’t give me a credit card unless your father or my father cosigns.” She lit up a cigarette. “Sweet Jesus, it’s 1974. I have a job. I make money. And a woman can’t get a credit card without a man’s signature. It’s a man’s world, baby girl.
You see things and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were And say, ‘Why not?’” – George Bernard Shaw.
It had been the first kiss for both of them, and to this day, when Dean kissed a woman, he longed for the smell of the sea.
Love shows us who we want to be. War shows us who we are.
She could hardly imagine a thing as terrible as losing your mother. The very thought of it made Leni sick to her stomach. A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds. Leni.
She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other.
Don’t think about who they are. Think about who you are and what sacrifices.
You were struggling to break free of being my daughter but unsure of how to be yourself, while I was afraid to let you go. It’s the circle of love.