Therese Anne Fowler Quotes & Sayings

In my experience, there were two kinds of men. One type - no matter how plain or how poor he might be - is always willing to at least try his luck with an attractive girl. The other type looks upon all of those first types with envy. — Therese Anne Fowler

What story will our kids be telling about us someday, do you suppose?" "It'll be a lot more romantic than two senators matchmaking," I said. "They'll say that we were meant to be together no matter what. For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled - prob'ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven't heard about it yet." "A Homeric epic, it sounds like. Have another glass of champagne and tell me more." * — Therese Anne Fowler

You - and I'll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays - fancies himself a poet, when all you're doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page. — Therese Anne Fowler

Life's most profound moments were, paradoxically, its most common ones: first breaths, and last. — Therese Anne Fowler

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change. — Therese Anne Fowler

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds
and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed. — Therese Anne Fowler

Even there in the midst of my belief that there was nothing worth salvaging, I could feel the truth of his words. Our circus act, begun at the Biltmore Hotel four years earlier, had mostly been a success. To admit as much, though, would be to undermine my argument. He would take the admission and twist it around in some way that would make him the victim and me the villain. I couldn't say what I knew: that I was the villain, too. — Therese Anne Fowler

I'm Alabama-born, so a transplant here - but I think I could enjoy growing some roots. — Therese Anne Fowler

Trouble, it don't need an engraved invitation. — Therese Anne Fowler

There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us? — Therese Anne Fowler

I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?"
The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap.
"Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that. — Therese Anne Fowler

We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one's softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately. — Therese Anne Fowler

I've come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun. — Therese Anne Fowler

If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised. — Therese Anne Fowler

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City. — Therese Anne Fowler

Consider: The mouth is the only bit of erotic landscape visible when a woman is dressed. It is the symbol of every moist cavern a woman possesses, which all men are bound to seek out, we have no choice. — Therese Anne Fowler

Won't we be quite the pair? - you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile. — Therese Anne Fowler

He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you. — Therese Anne Fowler

A man deserves credit when he accomplishes something of importance. Something that provides for the betterment of his life and his family's life and, whenever possible, mankind. — Therese Anne Fowler

Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman - for all humans, in fact - comes when one discovers and then achieves one's ultimate purpose. — Therese Anne Fowler

His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek's rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths. — Therese Anne Fowler

There's nothing like losing yourself in someone else's troubles to make you forget your own. — Therese Anne Fowler

I could focus again on why we'd all come here in the first place. I could focus on Scott. How handsome and distinguished he looked in his dark gray suit, a finer cut than I'd seen him in before. He looked like the man he said he was going to be, and I thought, I will never doubt him again. — Therese Anne Fowler

Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today. — Therese Anne Fowler

No writer should be the same as another, that's not art. — Therese Anne Fowler

He believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do. - Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald — Therese Anne Fowler

Exhaustion's not an excuse, its a reason — Therese Anne Fowler

What men need is to grow up. — Therese Anne Fowler

Adventure:' there's a word that worked on us both like a charm. — Therese Anne Fowler

While I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be. — Therese Anne Fowler

Maybe I ought to have put her together with Coco, who might have enlightened us both about the impracticality and undesirability of giving one's whole self to any man - for all the good it would have done. — Therese Anne Fowler

This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await. — Therese Anne Fowler

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. — Therese Anne Fowler

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen. — Therese Anne Fowler

Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say? — Therese Anne Fowler

If only. Were there sadder words than these? — Therese Anne Fowler

When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less. — Therese Anne Fowler

This is what we've got at the moment, who we are. It's not nearly what we once had- the good, I mean- but it's also not what we once had, meaning the bad. — Therese Anne Fowler

Are we rich?" "We're unstoppable. — Therese Anne Fowler

-no, I was a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I'd ever been before. — Therese Anne Fowler

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too. — Therese Anne Fowler

Critics were rigid and hidebound, never willing to give due credit for anything that didn't fit in with their predetermined parameters of what fiction ought to be. — Therese Anne Fowler