129 Quotes by Beatriz Williams

I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel.

His scorn was so huge, Violet could have reached out and grabbed a fistful of it.

You lay down these tracks, even though you know it’s not the right track, even though you can see what track’s the right one. But you don’t know how to get off yours. You know how you want to behave, what you want to be, the change you need to make – the thing you need to stop doing, or start doing – and yet you stay on your old track. You can’t find the switch that takes you to the other one. You can see the change, the desired state, but you can’t quite touch it.

I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I’m gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry’s coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry’s going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman.

If you simply go on having passionate affairs, you never have to give it up. It’s like being in love constantly, for ever and ever, only with different people.

You must find whatever ugliness there exists within him and have the courage to extract it, like a bad tooth, or if it cannot be extracted to actually journey inside him and gather the ugliness in your arms for metamorphosis, by the strength and the purity of your love to make him beautiful again.

Turn your head. No, the other way. Out the window.′ I turn to the steamed-over plate glass, the shadowed buildings across the street. ‘What, like this?’ ‘Now move your eyes and look at me. Just your eyes. Tilting up a bit. Yes.’ He breathes out. ‘Just like that. that, Miss Lily Dane, of only the best sorts of places, that is why I couldn’t go back to sleep last night.

Across the road, at the edge of the yellow beach, an especially large wave rises to the sky, gathering strength and power, until it can’t bear the strain any longer and dives for shore in a long, elegant undulation, from north to south. An instant later, the boom reaches us, like the firing of a seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell – a sound I know all too well. My nerves flinch obediently.

I had the best of times. I’m not the sort of chap who’s going to grovel on about what a stupid, callow fool he was in his salad days, how it was all a great waste of time, nothing but ruination.