18 Quotes by Therese Anne Fowler

Yet she understood a truth she could never say aloud: this ideal life was still deficient. She was not wholly content. Perhaps she should be, but contentment, she had learned, lay beyond money's considerable reach.

Every sort of trouble I can think of, we've tried it out- become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I've come to wonder whether artists in particularity seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?

Alva did suffer when the next wave came, and again and again and again, but a short while later she brought into the Vanderbilt family a girl with tufts of dark hair and wide eyes and the sweetest little bow of a mouth. This infant was perfect. Pain? What pain? Look at this child!

Even there in the midst of my belief that there was nothing worth salvaging, I could feel the truth of his words. Our circus act, begun at the Biltmore Hotel four years earlier, had mostly been a success. To admit as much, though, would be to undermine my argument. He would take the admission and twist it around in some way that would make him the victim and me the villain. I couldn't say what I knew: that I was the villain, too.

Here was a question she'd considered at some length: at New Hope she'd been taught that premarital sex was more than just a bad idea, it was sinful. In God's eyes, though, what was the difference between having sex with someone you loved before you were married, and having sex with someone you loved after you were married? If you undertook the act in a genuine state of mind and heart, if it was done in love, didn't that make it a pure act? God knew her heart.

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

... while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.