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Quote by Beatriz Williams

“There's something about the smells of your childhood, isn't there? ... You still remember those small sublime joys with an ache of longing because there's no getting it back, is there? You cannot return to a state of innocence.”

Quote by Beatriz Williams

Work

The Summer Wives

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Author

Beatriz Williams

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“Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.”

“As I took my children sledding this morning, I watched them fly down the hill - aiming for the jump and flying in the air. Getting the wind knocked out of them as they landed hard then climbing up to do it again - relentless and brave. I took a moment to be happy they are young and innocent and appreciate the simple thrill of going fast down a hill. I pushed my own nervous inclination aside and instead of saying "Be careful!" I said "Aim Straight!" Then I let them go down the jump again and again because in this world, we need to be relentless and brave and I need to be sure they don't unlearn it.”

“To fail is nothing, unless you continue to ignore Cosmic Ordering.”

“Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bat, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies--the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.”