Quotes from Barbara Samuel

Again, she wanted to photograph Thomas, or rather the scene itself—the quality of yellow against the wall behind his head, the smeary look of the water on the window, his strong brown hands clasped around that plain cup. The sight of his knuckles felt both too comfortable and too enclosing, and with a sense of rising panic, she looked at the rain and wondered how long it would last. How long could two strangers just make small talk

Puffs of dust-scented air wafted around my ankles. The narrow wooden steps disappeared into yawning darkness, and even when I turned on the light, it wasn't particularly inviting. I hate basements—spiders and water bugs and the possibility of creepy, supernatural things lurking.

Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than lust. —PIERS PAUL READ

And yet, as a mother, I still felt I'd made the right decision. Daniel had advantages to offer that I simply could not. Because he was black and so was Giselle, painful as it was to go there. Because he did love his daughter madly, and maybe he'd made some points about the desirability of his being the primary parent.

The real miracle is that I didn't kill anybody else." "Or go to jail for a long time." "Yeah. Lucky, I guess." "Or white." He smiled. "That, too.

It wasn't that they were bad people. It just suddenly seemed to me that there wasn't much room in their world for anyone who wasn't just like them.

1453: Coffee is introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opens there in 1475. Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

Women," she said, "need to tell stories about what happens to them. That's how we get it to make sense.

Women," she said, "need to tell stories about what happens to them. That's how we get it to make sense." "Interesting. What do men do?" "Have heart attacks, and sex with strange women.