Quotes from Sylvia Brownrigg

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

It could not always be love in the afternoon and passion in the night, gifts given, notes written, meals fed to each other. It can't all be like that.

This was another item about growing up: you encountered all the cliches of love and loss and heartbreak.

He did not know what it was like to be two women in love.

Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn't just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health.

Don;t blush, for God's sake. You and your blushing - you're like some Victorian maiden.

She'd have to start smoking. There would be no other way through this.

I was busy falling in love at first sight. So I had to stare. That's what you do when you're falling in love at first sight. You go into soft focus, and romantic music starts playing in the background.

I'd like to pay your palms the same favor that you pay these pages, searching them for grooves and images and the secret signs of hunger, as you may scan these words for hidden messages. The lines of your hand might be a guide to your gifts for pleasure, or a clue to where you'll take me, or a map of where I might take you.

The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.

fondle a plump plastic-wrapped volume, crack it's often-cracked back and spread open the pages. Swallow what's in there, whatever it is. Devour the words.

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book. I plan to give this book to you and know you'll read it, so our minds may meet across these pages, in the colorful country of another writer's language, where we can flourish in the knowledge that we are learning how to speak to one another; and so our mouths will know what to do when they finally come together.

You know, babe. Her voice had an older woman's weary advice in it. You're so hungry. You want so much. Well. Flannery shrugged. So what? I'll never get it. You might. If you stop asking. I'll never stop asking. I know. Anne touched her cheek. It's one of the things that makes you strangely lovable.

Flannery never forgot this. Anne Arden, a woman who meant more to Flannery than Flannery felt she could ever have meant to Anne, had found the person she was intended for; so Flannery need not be bitter, and never was. Anne loved Jasper, and was loved. What more could you want for someone who mattered to you?

We will never be together. Sweetheart. I am too brittle, hidden, and snappish, and you are too married. You are altogether too married.

He wants me back. The closing punctuation of obviously hung in the air. The confidence in her! Anne would always have it: the certainty that there would be a trail of people following her, wanting her love and her beauty. Flannery saw that confidence, and through the polluted air now between them it no longer charmed her. Not tonight it didn't. Flannery was not inclined to be one of that number.

She was a writer, yes, or had been once, and sometimes she could still be beautifully articulate. Other times, she simply could not find the right thing, or anything at all, to say.

People are cruel, and they will do anything.

Once Flannery found it, she couldn't stop wanting that pleasure, enjoying the sound of her own short breaths in the quiet night air. More. Over. Again. She had to make up for lost years.

We will never be together.

Love makes people narcissists: this, too, Flannery now saw.

Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments.

She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o'clock.