Lady Oracle Quotes
"I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it."
"The trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow everyone would mistake for solid reality."
"It wasn’t the kind of balcony a man would stand under playing a lute and yearning or clamber up bearing a rose in his teeth or a stiletto in his sleeve."
"It’s no good thinking you’re invisible if you aren’t, and the problem was: if I had recognized the old man, perhaps he had recognized me."
"The Queen would not snivel: regret is gauche."
"You can’t change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do."
"I was safe, I could begin again, but instead I sat on my balcony, beside the remains of a kitchen window broken before my time, and made choking noises."
"The grief was always real but it came out as a burlesque of grief, an overblown imitation like the neon rose on White Rose Gasoline stations, gone forever now."
"Years of murdered breakfasts, why had I done it?"
"Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind."
"If Desdemona was fat who would care whether or not Othello strangled her?"
"I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it."
"What was the matter with me? It wasn’t that I couldn’t dance."
"They could trace my hair much more easily than they could ever trace me."
"I would gaze at him as if I would never see him again. And now I would never see him again."
"Sometimes, when they’d left me alone in the darkness and cold, I would stand there almost hoping that the bad man would really come up out of the ravine and do whatever he was fated to do."
"For once I had impressed them, though I wasn’t sure why; there hadn’t been anything frightening about the man, he had smiled."
"I was astute enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to explain where I’d got them in a way my mother would approve of."
"Was the man who untied me a rescuer or a villain? Or, an even more baffling thought: was it possible for a man to be both at once?"
"Her plans for me weren’t specific. They were vague but large, so that whatever I did accomplish was never the right thing."
"She was an attractive woman, even into her late thirties, she had kept her figure, she had been popular in her youth."
"My father didn’t come back until I was five, and before that he was only a name, a story which my mother would tell me and which varied considerably."
"I was five feet four and still growing, and I weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds."
"She was tired of having a teenaged daughter who looked like a beluga whale and never opened her mouth except to put something into it."
"I can never remember calling her anything but Mother, never one of those childish diminutives."
"I was accustomed to thinking of Aunt Lou as wise; she was certainly generous."
"I keep getting messages from that Scotsman," Aunt Lou said musingly. "The one with the red hair and bagpipes. I wonder what he meant about the mats."
"I haven’t the faintest idea," Aunt Lou said. "Nobody I know of ever played the bagpipes. He’s certainly not a relation."
"I wouldn’t dream of it," said Aunt Lou. "I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings."
"If The Other Side was so wonderful, why did the spirits devote most of their messages to warnings?"
"That’s my mother!" I said to Aunt Lou in a piercing whisper. "She’s not even dead yet!"
"Then it must’ve been her astral body," she said placidly.
"You have great gifts," she said, looking into my eyes. "Great powers. You should develop them."
"She told me I had great powers," I said. "She told me the same thing. Maybe we both have them."
"You never can tell," said Aunt Lou. "If he is dead, it would be just like him not to say anything."
"We are the few that are left," he said. "The Russians killed off the others."
"But I didn’t want a Polish Countess living with us – where would she sleep? – discussing me in Polish and siding with Paul against me."
"I was walking in Hyde Park, in July 1963. From either side came the sound of orations, doom-laden as the Old Testament."
"He was devoted to his mother, which was tolerable only at a distance."
"Arthur was fickle, he changed allegiances, and after I’d been through this a few times I became wary."
"Men are mysterious too, you know, and I don’t notice them wearing ringlets and waltz-length ball gowns."
"It was only on the way up or the way down that I existed for him as any kind of distinct shape; otherwise I was just a kind of nourishing blob."
"I admired and envied his purity of conscience, despite its drawbacks."
"My failure was a performance and Arthur was the audience."
"I couldn’t tell what Arthur felt about me, if anything."
"I didn’t love Arthur for his theories, although they lent him a kind of impersonal grandeur."
"Everything catches up to you sooner or later. You should stop feeling so sorry for yourself."
"I didn’t want Arthur to understand me: I went to great lengths to prevent this."
"They themselves made it from crisis to crisis, with running commentaries, on a combination of nerve ends, cigarettes, bludgeoning honesty and what used to be called nagging."
"There were two kinds of love, I told myself; Arthur was terrific for one kind, but why demand all things of one man?"
"In order to get a soul you had to suffer, you had to give something up; or was that to get legs and feet?"
"I kept Arthur in our apartment and the strangers in their castles and mansions, where they belonged."
"I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept on, but I was forced to stop."
"I wasn’t cut out for the occult, I told myself."
"It’s evident that this is a book that has something for everyone."
"Arthur was feeling touchy, so I didn’t suggest anything else."
"I think he suspected this; he certainly headed off my few tentative attempts at self-revelation."
"Arthur was displeased again, as I knew he would be."
"I’m not a metaphor man, myself," Sam said, "but I thought it was a pretty good book."
"I’m not going to write any more books," I said.
"I’m just depressed because it’s raining and I don’t have any money."
"Going away, of course," he said, still elated.
"You must be crazy," I said. "Where would we go?"
"I want to wake up in the morning and eat breakfast with you and read The Globe and Mail"
"I don’t think we could," I said. "I’m a terrible cook. I burn things."
"That’s the trouble with you, you have no motives. Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You’re like an out-of-control school bus."
"I’m going to bed," I told Arthur. I couldn’t act, I couldn’t even think straight.
"It’s not political," I said. "It’s personal."
"I could never love anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur."
"I think you understand me well enough, Mrs. Foster. Or should I say Miss Delacourt, Miss Louisa K. Delacourt, author of Love Defied and others?"
"But what had she ever done to deserve it? How could I sacrifice her for the sake of Charlotte?"
"It’s very complicated, but it has to do with money. I’m quite rich, that’s why these people want to kill me, so they will get the money."
"He was wearing a coat. A dark coat, American."
"It occurred to me that his visit was no friendly one. It was a negotiation."
"I decided quickly that I’d have to leave that evening, I’d drive to Rome."
"I could help you. There is a house, farther back, away from the town."
"The soldiers or police were in on it, too, they would help him."
"I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a cage, as a fat whore."
"It was just an ordinary maze, there was nothing unusual about it."
"From now on, I thought, I would dance for no one but myself."
"They’d shoot anything that moved here, almost, they ate the songbirds in pies."
"It was noon when she entered the maze. She was determined to penetrate its secret at last."
"I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere; there was something, some fact or clue, that I had overlooked."
"I guess I just got carried away: he looked like someone else."
"I don’t think I’ll ever be a very tidy person."