Valerie Martin Quotes & Sayings

How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken? — Valerie Martin

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars. — Valerie Martin

Because it requires the total surrender of my will and finally, ultimately, the wholesale destruction of my ego. That is hard. It I'm going to another world, I cry out, I want to be ME in it. — Valerie Martin

I see I have this patience to wait it out, and the truth is no matter how dark I feel I would never take my own life, because when the darkness is over, then what a blessing is the feeblest ray of light! — Valerie Martin

Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line. — Valerie Martin

He put a dark place in me and I can't forgive him for that. But it's a part of me now and how can I regret what I am - though it often makes me sad. — Valerie Martin

Don't be a chicken, be a cat!" said Cecil. "Be adventurous". — Valerie Martin

But you said you no longer care for the world's opinion," I said to him, "nor will I. — Valerie Martin

It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry. — Valerie Martin

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times
his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice? — Valerie Martin

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast. — Valerie Martin

The natural beauty of the earth made hard for me to consider the pathetic struggle of humans on the face of it. The great release of death, I thought, was not from the bondage to our lovely planet- who could ever wish to leave this extraordinary place?- but from one another. — Valerie Martin

I've caused you pain, and I'm sorry for it,' she said. 'But perhaps that pain will keep you from forgetting me. — Valerie Martin

One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television. — Valerie Martin

(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and ... all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for. — Valerie Martin

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination. — Valerie Martin

Sex can be estranging; it can drive two otherwise compatible people apart. — Valerie Martin

The air was still. It was that hour before evening when the sun sheds great horizontal beams just above the horizon and the air itself reveals levels of dust and insect life previously unthought of. — Valerie Martin

And it seemed to me that longing was everything, longing is all we are. — Valerie Martin

That's my problem. I'm constantly wary. I can't trust anyone. — Valerie Martin