Pawleys Island Quotes
"The weather that day seemed without guile, but I knew better."
"Let me tell you something, honey. You’d never catch me in a swimsuit smelling like cocoa butter and fruit, sticky with salt and sand, half catatonic and dehydrated from exposure."
"The waves rolled in low murmurs of hypnotic suggestion, washed the shore and pulled away."
"Life was so strange. I thought I was going to move into my family’s house and write my memoirs, but all I had done was exercise and slide in and out of social commitments."
"If you looked twice at my house you would scratch your head wondering why I loved it so much."
"When you lose a parent at a young age, those few memories you have are more precious than any single ring or necklace left to you."
"The thought of reliving my past through writing it all down? Well, let’s just say that I had yet to arrive at the moment where I felt comfortable enough to play with my inner gorillas."
"Huey was the consummate southern gentleman, an aristocratic Nathan Lane, never rude to anyone’s face but felt no remorse about a wicked comment to me about others, especially tourists."
"Even Huey agreed with that. As much as the Waccamaw waters flowed through his veins, on many evenings I had seen the look on his face when we shared the end of day, watching the moonrise over the Atlantic. You can’t paint this, he would say."
"I imagine you could say I’m a lucky woman, at least in terms of inheritance and assets."
"When the world was so filled with trouble, how could the day be this magnificent, this stunningly beautiful?"
"Everything about the birds and the plants was designed not only for their survival but for them to thrive."
"Buttercups, black-eyed susans and clumps of yellow-green grasses crept around the bottoms of them, happy to live on droplets of water during dry spells and growing rampant after heavy rains."
"Eternity seemed to be in sight but slightly out of my grasp."
"Maybe it was just me, but the political world that had once fascinated me now just left me shaking my head wondering how America, who had fed, sheltered and defended the masses, had arrived at a place of such low esteem to the rest of the world."
"The tide rose and fell anyway. It didn’t matter which generation occupied the house."
"If any one thing was to be said of Pawleys Island, it was that it reminded you of what was true in the most basic terms. You were born, you lived and then you died."
"The only thing working in my favor was that I didn’t have anything else to lose."
"I wanted him to suffer like I had, to doubt himself and to feel guilt and shame and for once in his miserable double dealing existence on this earth, I wanted him to see what a horrible person he was."
"Victory was possible and more likely so because there was shared conviction, tenacity and enthusiasm."
"Sometimes being right is the worst thing in the world."
"You take all these questions off the papers and I’ll consider your freedom."
"Get rid of the questions, Becca, and we’ll talk about fairness."
"You stupid bitch! You want to ruin my name and my family’s name? There is no way in hell you’re going to get away with it, Becca."
"You don’t ever lecture me about what’s fair, okay? I already told you that I’ll be fair with you. After all, you’re entitled to something. I realize that."
"You sure you can afford me? My work is the best, but it ain’t no bargain."
"The smells of curry and onions wafting all around them, coming from a hot plate in the back room."
"You don’t know what it’s like to be without your children. You don’t want that, Rebecca."
"I wasn’t sure how to tell Rebecca what I suspected."
"Do you really think Nat Simms is the kind of man who would hurt someone?"
"There was so much stuff in that house of hers that it would never be mine."
"Your improvements would be evaluated and fifty percent of the cost of the surgeries would be awarded to the wife."
"She was always nagging them to do this and that! Those poor kids couldn’t ever just be kids, you know what I mean?"
"The atmosphere has deteriorated to one of walking on eggshells to avoid the rage of his wife."
"The real killer was that Nat just didn’t want to give her anything after all those years she put up with them."
"I can help you. I want to help you. You and the children are all I’ve got now."
"You know how women always want more than you want to give, right?"
"If you think you’re getting these back, you can forget it! These boobs are mine and these teeth are mine and this fanny is all mine!"
"I didn’t care if he wanted to have sex three times a day or how he wanted to do it either. All I wanted was to be in that house fixing his dinners and reading story books to little innocent children, making them all happy."
"I knew he didn’t love her anymore, and I figured they would wind up divorced anyway."
"You’re their grandfather and nothing will ever change that. I forgive you. Of course I forgive you. I probably would’ve done the same thing if I were in your shoes."
"The big deal, Mr. Simms, is that the computer tower is located in your bedroom and almost all of these site visits happened after two o'clock in the morning and on weeknights."
"This court awards full custody of the children and the house to Rebecca Simms, with the proviso that they begin family counseling immediately for a period of one year."
"I didn’t wreck your life, Nat. You wrecked it yourself."
"Sometimes notoriety comes to us whether we like it or not. And that’s what has happened to you today. You have uninvited attention."
"I couldn’t stand to wear the ones I had worn yesterday, even though I was going to get dirty and sweaty in the garden. I don’t think that’s strange, because if I passed out in the yard and someone walking by saw me and called EMS, the forensics department at the hospital would know that my underwear was recently changed."
"We are all in this together, Sami, Evan. We may as well make the best of it."
"Families have obligations to each other that sometimes supercede personal ambitions."
"The kind of learning that stays with you comes by example, not a conversation."
"I wanted to cry, I had so many feelings of relief and sorrow combined."
"That night my mind shifted from the surprising joy of having my children with me again, and the worry that I had ever let myself believe I would not want to be with them anymore."
"If nothing else, I would use every power I had to make them psychologically stronger than I had been."
"What the hell was I doing going on the Today Show? I hadn’t cured cancer. I didn’t fly to Mars. I wasn’t a big-deal anything."
"There was nothing like having children to teach yourself how to behave."
"Well, a lot of hearts are surely damaged if not broken."
"I could feel the gears turning in their head and in Evan’s head."
"She’s not cold, butt-breath, she’s stronger."
"It wasn’t necessary to say anything then. The proof was right in front of them."
"We’re not going to call your daddy an ass, okay? We know he’s an ass, but we’re not going to say it."
"But in the end, didn’t the most important and precious things we gave each other come from our hearts?"