47 Quotes by Melanie Benjamin

I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.

It is devastating to see a loved one suffer; it is harder to bear than your own pain. Love is despair, love is delight. Love is fear, love is hope. Love is mercy. Love is anger.

I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don’t let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject’s emotions and relationships.

Perhaps he simply needs to mark their existence by noting their absence.

How does one know that, before the first hello? It’s a heaviness in the air combined with a lightness of step. It’s a slowing down of the past, and a speeding up of the future.

Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others? I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost – woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity – in all the stages of a woman’s life?

Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.

It was her style, that indefinable asset. It was said that the others had style but Babe was style.

The girls we’d believed to have been lost in the haze of regret and recrimination that comes with surviving in the unscrupulous business; this unjust world. But it turned out they’d been here all along, these two; caught forever in a shared moment, preserved together in a silver frame.