A Reliable Wife Quotes
"Nothing says hell has to be fire, thought Ralph Truitt, standing in his sober clothes on the platform of the tiny train station in the frozen middle of frozen nowhere."
"You don’t escape the things, mostly bad, that just happen to you. The loss of love. The disappointment. The terrible whip of tragedy."
"For twenty years, not one person had said good night to him as he turned off the light and lay down to sleep."
"We all want the simplest things, he thought. Despite what we may have, or the children who die, we want the simplicity of love."
"In the end, the virtues of the body came easily to Ralph. Believe what he might, he was tall, and good-looking and strong and rich. The virtues of the heart were unknown to him."
"She could not, would not live without love or money."
"She watched herself in the mirror as she did these things. She saw, for a moment, the reflection of her headless body. It was not unpleasant."
"The trick, Ralph knew, is not to give in. Not to hunch your shoulders in the cold or stamp your feet or blow warm breath into cold palms. The trick is to relax into the cold, accept that it had come and would stay a long time."
"Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims."
"His heart never hardened to the pain, the hatred never ceased its relentless beat."
"Absence from her was physically painful, as though his nerves were on fire."
"He had already spent three years in the silver vaults and picture markets of Europe, and he knew that the aristocracy were always reluctant to part with their treasures."
"You will see, she said, this is silly. No one will die."
"She ate with an appetite that excited and appalled her."
"She thought of people, ordinary people, moving through the streets of the cities, and she marveled at the commonplace of their lives."
"I have tried to lead a good life. I have tried to be kind, no matter what I felt, no matter how hard it was."
"Everything gets a fresh start. It’s not just possible. It happens."
"He played a popular song, but he played it slowly and sorrowfully, as though it had never been played before."
"There was something small but magnificent about his performance, a little jewel, an invention of love."
"He played as though each note could be touched, could be held in the hand like mercury."
"I've lost my stickpin. From my necktie. A diamond stickpin given to me by somebody I loved."
"He was a calla lily, pure and white, meant for solitude and death."
"She burned with the image of Tony Moretti sitting in the restaurant with his oysters, his liquid eyes, and his long fingers playing the sorrowful, trivial tune."
"She couldn’t sleep. She felt Truitt was watching her, that Truitt had known all along this would happen."
"I’m just a ten-year-old boy, standing in the dark of his mother’s closet, smelling her dresses."
"Making love to him was not like food. It was not nourishment. It was like fire, and when she came, she came down in ashes."
"She stood in the kingdom of touch, and it was an ecstasy to her."
"He could feel the warmth of it shooting through her veins like fire."
"She sat in a chair by the darkening window. 'After she left, after he drove my mother away, after my sister died, I would sneak over to the old house, to the villa, and climb the staircase and go into her room.'"
"My father has acted as my father since I was born."
"She smelled the woman who had recently left."
"Whatever his desperate sorrow, he kept on as before. He was cordial and well mannered and evenhanded with the workers, and he was dying and he knew he was dying and kindness seemed to be all that was left."
"He smelled flowers, in his dreams. He smelled almonds. He smelled his own flesh dying."
"Poison. It was the poison of pleasure, the poison he had known would kill him."
"He would sit on the edge of the bed, shivering and burning up with itching."
"You asked. I told you. Never mention her name again."
"He reached out and touched her hair. He caught a single strand between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth."
"The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him."
"I want . . . I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t."
"Play the hand you have, Antonio, that’s all anybody expects. And it’s a pretty good hand."
"If you spend your days speaking to someone who speaks a foreign language, how are you ever to be understood?"
"Let it go, Antonio would tell himself late at night, as he lay on the nursery room floor. Live a regular life, crippled, sorrowful, but sweetly ordinary."
"She had woven a circle around him and kept him safe for a time. Then the monsters returned to claim him, and he himself became a monster—cruel, unyielding, and conniving."
"It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart."
"It was just a story of how the bitter cold gets into your bones and never leaves you, of how the memories get into your heart and never leave you alone."