Quotes from Belva Plain

All is pattern, all life, but we can't always see the pattern when we're part of it.

How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire

in that childhood room for whose warmth and safety we search all the rest of our lives and never find again.

A little damage could only be an improvement

He was well enough acquainted with popular psychology to diagnosis his ailment; depression was anger turned inward. After

Still, if your leg was broken, you felt the pain, and it didn't ease the pain to be told that somebody else had two broken legs.

A person who studies the universe will enlarge his mind and hatred will become picayune, stupid, impossible. Did you enjoy the book we sent to you?" "I tore it up," Tom said, and not trying to hide his shame, looked straight at Arthur.

Oh!" cried the mother in her bitterness, "I'll never understand! A hereditary disease, and never before in either of our families. And our other child with no sign of it. Thank God," she added quickly.

You have a talent, and that's more than enough to bring you happiness.

There's more to people than what you can see, isn't there, Aunt Lillian?" Immediately, Lillian pursued the subject. "What do you mean? He respects you, I hope." "Respect" in the aunts' vocabulary meant "no sex." "Yes, he respects me.

Revolution, and this is—

We affect the future of those who come after us almost as much as we affect our own.

common arrangement, but it can be done if you know the right people.

For where there is love of man, there is love of the art." AESCULAPIUS

I'd rather have a bleeding heart than a frozen one, or perhaps no heart at all.

What can be wrong?" they asked the doctor and their friends and themselves. "Oh, nothing but colic, it usually is just colic." So the formula was changed, and that did work for a time. But only for a time. It had to be changed again and yet again. Then the doctor himself began to seem uncertain.…

Enough," Arthur said. "We've come to the end. Now accept.

She's a typical artist, a student

Such moods do not last unless the possessor of them is prepared to wither away, and Eve was not about to let herself wither.

Over and over, she had tended that dress as it wore out, knotting the first loose threads, catching the next tiny rent, mending and hiding the splits one after the other, wearing the dress as long as the fabric could be decently held together, until eventually there came a tear too wide to be bound up, and the dress had to go. Perhaps her life with Bud had been like that and had been destined to end even without his death.

What you've made here is a complete neighborhood." Pauline mused. "You might live in it without ever needing to leave it for anything, couldn't you?

... wore sorrow and anger like a worn-out coat and would not throw it away.

Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger.

How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!