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The Women QUOTES

The Women QUOTES

1 " This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

2 " constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

3 " The thought arrested her and she pulled away from him just to stand there a moment and take in the strangeness of it all. Music drifted down to her then, an odd tinkling sort of music with a rippling rhythmic undercurrent that seemed to tug the melody in another direction altogether, into the depths of a deep churning sea, but beautiful for all that, and so perfect and unexpected. She felt languid and free--all eyes were on her, every man turning to stare--and it came to her that she loved this place, this moment, these people. She could stay here forever, right here, in the gentle sway of the Japanese night. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

4 " He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

5 " three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

6 " For Wrieto-San, every building at Taliesin was in a state of flux. When he accidentally set fire to the theater at Hillside one windy afternoon in the thirties (brush, kerosene, poor judgment), he took me aside with a wink and a nod and told me he’d been looking for an excuse to renovate the shoddy old thing for years. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

7 " Throughout his career, Wrieto-San made a point of arranging meetings in his studio, where he could feel both impregnable and masterful, rather like a tortoise encapsulated in a gilded shell. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

8 " Again, one wonders how Wrieto-San was able to come up with the financing to purchase materials and employ a cohort of some twenty-five masons, carpenters and laborers, many of whom had to be housed and fed on the premises. I can imagine him working his legendary charm, of course, and perhaps even trading off the sympathetic reaction to Mamah’s death as a wedge to separate friends, tradesmen and prospective clients alike from their resources, and yet still . . . "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

9 " Wrieto-San adopted the square as his symbol because he understood it to represent probity, solidity, the virtues of the foursquare, and, of course, it is testamentary to the rectilinear patterns of his early and middle work. In contradistinction, we Japanese believe the circle to be the ideal form, as it is perfectly harmonious, sans the sharp individual edges of the square. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

10 " But Wrieto-San was, if anything, a rugged individualist, a one-man, as we say, like the lone cowboy of the Wild West films. Personally, I like to think that it was the Japanese influence that inspired him to employ a circular design for his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum of New York. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

11 " Ellen Key. ‘Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

12 " But in any case—and the thought lifted her like a sweet fresh breeze blowing all the way across the sodden plains from the painted peaks of the Rockies—Mamah was no more. Let Colorado keep her. Let her preach free love to the ranch hands and lasso all the husbands in the state right out of their saddles. Let her be a cowgirl. Let her wither. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

13 " She lifted the glass to her lips, let the taste of the cold clear liquid—the taste of France, of civilization—soothe her throat and her nerves and her temper too. She didn’t bother to "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

14 " Maybe this was the way it was out here in the country, everyone battened down to survive the interminable winter, all human hopes and joys and aspirations buried under a heap of quilts, to bed at dark and up with the cows. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

15 " Somehow they were both standing. His arm was round her shoulders and his hand—his hand—was unconsciously massaging the short thick sturdy hairs the seal had once worn in the polar sea to fight back the chill of the world. It was perfect. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

16 " Lloyd left in mid-January, on a day so bleak and gray the sky might have been the lid of a coffin for all the light that shone through. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

17 " The house went silent. The night came down and lay across the roof like a presence out of the forest primeval that had once stood here, on this lot, while Indians beat their squaws and stripped the flesh from their enemies with knives of stone. He drew himself up. Leveled his eyes on her. “She’s my soul mate, Catherine. Can’t you understand that? My soul mate. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

18 " has lost all sense of morality and religion and is damnably to be blamed—though he’d crumpled up the paper and tossed it in the fire like the rag it was. Damnably to be blamed. Why couldn’t they leave him alone to live his life as he saw fit? Who made the rules to contain him? Rules were for other people, ordinary people, people who had neither insight nor originality or any sense of the world but what they’d been force-fed by the Reverend Luccocks and their ilk. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

19 " Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS: B—Blends in with the surroundings L—Low in silhouette I—Irregular in shape S—Small in size S—Secluded "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women

20 " He paused to remove his spectacles so that his eyes floated up at her like two faintly greenish fish in a yellowed aquarium. "

― T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Women