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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The woman turned and went slowly into the house. As she passed the doors she turned and looked back. Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in here eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.”

“The woman turned to him, and he observed she was someone his own age or a bit younger. Dark, wavy hair and large brown eyes behind schoolmarm glasses. A friendly, olive-complected face. Not stereotypically Southern, if there was such a thing. Greek or Spanish maybe. He wasn’t sure. What he did know was that he felt something then. Something that was shapeless and intangible, but neither quality made it—whatever it was—any less there. It was a shifting of his senses or maybe even of reality itself. You turned a corner and a stunning landscape presented itself, and though you yourself had not changed, everything else had for, after you’d seen this new thing, whatever this thing was, you automatically understood the mechanisms of life could not go back to where they had been before. The sight—though it could more properly be called an experience, encompassing all five senses and even ones not yet discovered—rendered everything before it monochrome and matte. John Pressman had only felt this way twice before in his life with a woman, and this time, he felt it at fifty years, four months, and twenty-three days of age. At a greasy spoon in a small town in Mississippi in the summer of 1961.”

“The woman walked into the bar for the first time in the winter rain. She didn’t have an umbrella on her; her little sleeveless dress ended at her ankles, fully drenched. Her wet dress clung to her body, showing the outlines of her curves. In one hand, she was carrying the skirt of her dress. Suddenly, she let it go, and one long, bare arm moved upward as she tried to fix her damp hair which had darkened in intensity due to the rain. It fell past her shoulders, the strands sticking to her face. She attempted to comb through the tangles with her fingertips. The men watched her movements hungrily, their eager faces drawn to her and at the sight of someone new. Their eyes trailed from her face, to her wet body, then back to the movements of her hands entwined in her hair. Under her other arm, she carried a book and a trench coat. It appeared strange she wasn't wearing the coat when it was pouring outside and freezing in the middle of November. Men were left mesmerized by her, and she turned heads as she walked by. Something radiated from within her, drawing the men around her in. The women who were with some of these men noticed their gaze on the unfamiliar woman. Now they stared at her with jealousy and anger. Who is she? they wondered.”

“The woman was imposing, unusually tall and rippling with what seemed to be hard-won muscle. She wore a one-shouldered jumpsuit that looked like it had been stitched together from a mixture of animal hides and discarded armor. Her exposed arm displayed an elaborate stretch of short slashing lines that had been cut into her dark skin from shoulder to elbow, and below the elbow she wore a leather bracer. Her thick hair was dyed blood red and she held it back in dreadlocks that trailed down her back.”

“The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.”

“The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart I do not mean the symbol of love, a candy shape to decorate cakes with, the heart that is supposed to belong or break; I mean this lump of muscle that contracts like a flayed biceps, purple-blue, with its skin of suet, its skin of gristle, this isolate, this caved hermit, unshelled turtle, this one lungful of blood, no happy plateful. All hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light, wetblack and glimmering, their four mouths gulping like fish. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart’s regular struggle against being drowned. But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen, and at night it is the infra-red third eye that remains open while the other two are sleeping but refuses to say what it has seen. It is a constant pestering in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum, a child’s fist beating itself against the bedsprings: I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart? Long ago I gave up singing to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled. One night I will say to it: Heart, be still, and it will.”

“The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.”

“The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.”

“The woman who makes a sweet, beautiful home, filling it with love and prayer and purity, is doing something better than anything else her hands could find to do beneath the skies. A true mother is one of the holiest secrets of home happiness. God sends many beautiful things to this world, many noble gifts; but no blessing is richer than that which He bestows in a mother who has learned love's lessons well, and has realized something of the meaning of her sacred calling.”

“The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.”

“The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They're pale, like a lioness's, nearly golden, but they also look like they've done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.”

“The woman who picked us up when we fell down or wiped our faces or fed us lunch or yelled us down from treetops or out of mud (all of it so casually, with barely a break in the conversation or an extra breath) may have been our mother but could just as easily have been someone else's. We hardly noticed. The women merged into a kind of laughing, chatting, benevolent blur, a network of distracted love and safekeeping.”