Best 32 quotes of Sandra Newman on MyQuotes

Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.

You're getting like an attitude. What you get put through for just wanting something more out of life. Makes you vulnerable. Inside, that tug of desperation, trying not to be excited, maybe this is it, and it's usually freaks and you want to shout I'm not like you.

All great works start with mistake. Ain’t no exception in this fact.

At last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.

But he was left with the all-too-familiar feeling of having been infected by insanity, of being drawn into someone else's insanity.

But this was reality, occluded and delicate.

For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.

He laughed and came forward impulsively to kiss her—his affection a potent thing, a flourish of light. She was smiling, her tears feeling fresh on her face. He smelled of sweat and roses. She felt it in the palms of her hands, in her loins. It was right. It was Southampton she had wanted all along.

Her sadness was an ecstasy, a guilt, an assignation.

In fact, whenever Ben thought about it, his worry would slowly evaporate. But when he didn't think about it, it niggled and made him need to think about it again.

It was as if they had never been apart.

It was a white pandemonium with the wrong past.

It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light.

Nonetheless, it left him with a terrible doubt, a fear that inhabited every scene.

Outdoors; everything one might dream. The fairy-gray clouded sky and the fairy-green misted wood. Her tall horse shying at a sparkling brook. All dreams.

She added in a tight, defensive voice that she panicked when she did jobs, it gave her existential panic. She could do them for a while, but it felt like darning socks in a burning building. Time was running out and . . . Did he ever get that?

She could hide in this small, dull life.

She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.

She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.

She was alone like a cat, like an owl, as if she walked unobserved, out of her human life.

So he thinks he has a baby and everything falls into place? What gets me is, people have babies and they're thinking what the baby will do for them. It's sick.

Some days, she was pain incarnate. She would suffer all day and he would try to cheer her up and fail, and he felt like an irrelevant gnat.

Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles' light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth's fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia's memory and passed on.

The dream was greater than a dream. It was a greater life than life.

The dream was strongest of all when Kate's heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn't prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.

The maidservants all were in love with Southampton, in a rapt, unhoping way, like a tribe of poets in love with the moon; one would have a fit of tears, then it spread to another and another, until all the house heaved with love's calamity.

Then it cleared: farther down the hallway, a door had opened on a flourish of sunlight. Into the light stepped a youth, white and gold, a celestial apparition—the Earl of Southampton. His face was beardless still, the eyes pale blue and with the lashless look of redheads. His auburn tresses, artfully curled, fell almost to his elbows. He was six feet tall and lovely as a waterfall, as pretty as a flowering tree. White silk, white velvet, cloth of gold. A gold filigree earring in one ear. Emilia knew him from her days of attendance on the Queen: an uncanny, androgynous youth with the despotic pout of the beautiful, who can never be sufficiently loved.

There can be no friendship between our peoples. We live in your nightmares, and you are but our dreams.

To Ben's eye, there were no apparent signs of wealth, though he wasn't sure what he'd expected. Fountains?

. . . while the world became the something else of dreams, of books, of Kate.

You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you?