129 Quotes by Beatriz Williams

I wish you all the happiness in the world, Frau Grant. I hope our paths meet again.

You know where you stand with a woman, when you have just made love to her after a long absence. She knows where she stands with you. You can go to sleep happy, listening to each other’s heartbeats, because you know her again and she knows you, because you are no longer strangers, and you will work everything out in the morning, over hot coffee and a good smoke.

There’s nothing like the scent of your own home, is there? I don’t mean how it ordinarily smells, when you’re living in it- that smell you don’t even notice, because it’s always there, and so are you. I mean the peculiar perfume that greets you when you’ve been away, the delicate balance of wood and paint and plaster and upholstery, stripped of your own living essence: just the substance of the house and nothing else.

All her life, Olive had wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again – like death, she supposed – and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future – 1893, imagine that! – became your present reality.

I need a gun. I need a gun to protect us, I need two or three. And do you think the civilized Matthias has a single gun in his civilized house? Of course not. We are left to defend ourselves with our bare hands. Because right is on our side. We can put that on our tombstones, eh? Right was on our side.

All you really need to know about the Paris Ritz is this: by the middle of 1937, Coco Chanel was living in a handsome suite on the third floor, and the bartender – an intuitive mixologist named Frank Meier – had invented the Bloody Mary sixteen summers earlier to cure a Hemingway hangover.

This is the switching point, Caspian,′ she whispered in his shirt. ‘This is me, switching tracks.’ ‘I guess that’s one thing to call it. A new one on me. We could start a new slang. Let’s go back to my place and switch tracks.

Life is complicated, without any sort of road map. We are bound to have disappointments and setbacks, and with each one we make the choice to reinvent ourselves as a stronger version of who we are.

Two o’clock in the morning with a newborn is the loneliest hour in the world.