Anne Rivers Siddons Quotes & Sayings

(voice) ... it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Anger is its own excuse and its own reward ... — Anne Rivers Siddons

Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain. — Anne Rivers Siddons

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness ... — Anne Rivers Siddons

Yancey crawled from her tangled bed one morning and assembled her long limbs and sharp bones into something as exotic and seductive to the eye as a peacock or a griffin or a unicorn. — Anne Rivers Siddons

The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, 'It is like drinking stars'. — Anne Rivers Siddons

To sputter and giggle - Baby too. "I followed my piss!" I said between hiccupping laughter. "She followed her piss and her dreams came true!" Rachel screamed. "Follow your piss, Obi-Wan Kenobi," Barbara intoned. — Anne Rivers Siddons

On a night of icy silver radiance, when the very sea and stars seemed on fire with light. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was ... young. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Her light brown eyes were the color of sherry, fringed with long, thick, gold-tipped lashes. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled. — Anne Rivers Siddons

You will have to grow up to her quickly, I thought, surprising myself, or you will lose her. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain. — Anne Rivers Siddons

(the villa) It's beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water. — Anne Rivers Siddons

A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur ... It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most ... timeless. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Leaving the air crystal and sweet and the dusty, used leaves sparkling. The lake surface was a diamond-dusted, dancing indigo ... — Anne Rivers Siddons

But there sometimes comes a moment, a small, silent white explosion of awareness. — Anne Rivers Siddons

You never, never ask a young man to take you anywhere, Molly. It's cheap. It sounds desperate. It sounds like you can't get a date any other way. With your height and those big breasts, you're always going to have to be careful not to look desperate. A real beauty can get away with it, maybe, but the rest of us ordinary girls have to be very, very careful not to look desperate. — Anne Rivers Siddons

...heavy satin that fell like spilled syrup... — Anne Rivers Siddons

All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait.
Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness. — Anne Rivers Siddons

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Everything about it and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep buried wildness in my heart. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia. — Anne Rivers Siddons

It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers. — Anne Rivers Siddons

It's unimaginable to me that I wouldn't write, but it's very imaginable that I won't write for a little while. — Anne Rivers Siddons

...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn... — Anne Rivers Siddons

And I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way. — Anne Rivers Siddons

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes. — Anne Rivers Siddons

You wouldn't maintain a house like that' you'd feet it and water it. You'd have to give it nourishment and love it to keep it alive and healthy. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Against the grape-flushed sky perfect amethyst night. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Sometimes I could scarcely breathe with the knowledge that for the rest of my life, whenever we wanted, Peter and I could lie down and do whatever we wished. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall. — Anne Rivers Siddons

At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long. — Anne Rivers Siddons