Paulette Quotes & Sayings

And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them. The — Paulette Jiles

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting. — Paulette Jiles

The baking wind tore at his hat and he held it by the brim with one hand. It relieved him to look at it, for the great river was like a long tale, of both great joy and great woe. And it seemed to be a story road that a person could take, and it would take him to some place where he could free his mind. Men had striven against one another to control the unreeling river-road, battling at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, at Baton Rouge and Vicksburg, in the heat of the summer and the humid choking air of the malarial swamps. But the river carried away men and guns and the garbage of war, covering it over, washing itself clean again as if they had never been. — Paulette Jiles

They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place. — Paulette Jiles

Pain was a peculiar thing. It made me feel strange; it made me retreat. I felt that my relationships to other people had changed in certain ways. I was carrying around a burden that only a few people knew about. It made me feel apart from most people, as if I could see them, but they were a long way away. People were going about their normal lives, and now I carried about with me all the time pain, as if pain were my child. We — Paulette Bates Alden

What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. — Paulette Jiles

Everyone has come to celebrate her return. They will go home and talk about it forever, unto the next generation. But they will not come here and ask about her welfare. — Paulette Jiles

You live in the present and you eliminate things that don't matter. You don't carry the burden of the past. — Paulette Goddard

Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow's-foot seams.
Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
— Paulette Jiles

Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works. — Paulette Jiles

The wardrobe threw open her doors. Inside were a few interesting things- one of the largest, clearest mirrors Belle had ever seen, some moths, and an extremely pretty collection of gowns that would have made the blond triplets, Paulette, Claudette, and Laurette, swoon.
Belle examined the dresses skeptically. Of course, if things went the way they did in fairy tales, they would all fit her perfectly. The question was, was this a "Bluebeard's Wives" situation? Or something else? — Liz Braswell

There comes a hush between darkness and day.
Like expectation of a caress.
A murmur of silence.
Tree crests peeked down at Paulette through slowly lifting fog. Bark felt around for its texture again. Morning gathered and drifted through mere hints; through vague hopeful nuances of 'Just maybe'.
- From "The Gardens of Ailana" handbook for healers & mystics — Edward Fahey

Her grandmother, as she gets older, is not fading but rather becoming more concentrated. — Paulette Alden

I thought you said you were trying to quit swearing!
Go to hell, Paulette. I will. As soon as I can have a whole week where no crazy or ridiculous or unbelievable shi*t happens an my mind is calm long enough to remember how to think. — Terry McMillan

Outside, as she passed the kitchen window, she watched her breath appear before her in the lamplight and then it died away in moist clouds. This was the smoke of her internal fire and her soul. Every breath was a letter to the world. These she mailed into the cold air leaning back with pursed lips to send it upward. — Paulette Jiles

I lived in Hollywood long enough to
learn to play tennis and become a star,
but I never felt it was my home. — Paulette Goddard

And she understood, all by herself, without reading it in a novel or hearing it on a radio program, that falling passionately in love with someone, without reservation or holding back, was good for the heart. For its valves and its arteries and that invisible shadow of the heart clled the soul. Falling in love was good for the soul.
— Paulette Jiles

Under what circumstances would those who are the beneficiaries of colonialism stop denying and choose to act differently? — Paulette Regan

Paulette shook her head and sighed. In her world Grace had failed to meet the responsibility of her own beauty. This was not just a waste but a sin. — Kathleen Tessaro

I love doing TV. It's such a breakneck pace, you know. It's kiss and go with your leading man. You meet them in the morning and go right into a clinch. The filming is over before you know their last names. — Paulette Goddard

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters. — Paulette Jiles

Actors and actresses who say they never go to see their own pictures are talking through their hats. You don't have to be a Freud to know that the most fascinating person in the world - actors or anybody - is yourself. — Paulette Goddard

Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful clouds. — Paulette Jiles

He who accepts the unaltered philosophy of another is as ludicrous as he who donshis neighbor's hat, and infinitely more ridiculous. — Paulette Goddard

Falls. He saw her bright, fierce little face break into laughter when the crowd laughed. It was good. Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works. THAT — Paulette Jiles

My imagination thinks in paragraphs. — Paulette L. Jones

Paper Matches
My aunts washed dishes while the uncles
squirted each other on the lawn with
garden hoses. Why are we in here,
I said, and they are out there?
That's the way it is,
said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one.
I have the rages that small animals have,
being small, being animal.
Written on me was a message,
"At Your Service,"
like a book of paper matches.
One by one we were taken out
and struck.
We come bearing supper,
our heads on fire. — Paulette Jiles

It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did. — Paulette Jiles

Writing the short story is essentially an act of grace. It's not a matter of will so much as trust. I try to let the story do some of the work for me. It knows what it wants to do, say, be. I try not to stand in its way. — Paulette Alden

Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter's end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he. — Katherine Boo

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not. — Paulette Jiles

The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some wort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds. And why we had invented it, or how we knew to invent it, was beyond him.
Newmann had seen some truth that was completely out of his power to put into words. But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide. — Paulette Jiles

That's why I read so much. A book isn't going to hurt me. A book isn't going to form some opinion about me that could wreck my life. I learn about so many new and great things from reading. I keep to myself with a good book and a shot of whiskey and I'm right with the world. — Paulette Mahurin

No matter what side you were on, if you had survived Gettysburg you were to be congratulated. — Paulette Jiles

Lucy paused, hands full of green beans, her memory flashing back to the giant pots of crawfish on the stove. Her Mama's green eyes would squint into the steam, hair pulled back, a frown of concentration on her face. The salted water was flavored and ready to receive the "mudbugs" out of their burlap sacks. Other than an onion or maybe an ear of corn, if it wasn't alive when you threw it in, then it shouldn't be in the pot, she'd say. Did her Mama mind that Lucy didn't cook those old family recipes? Was she turning her back on her culinary heritage as surely as Paulette was?
She snapped the ends of the beans faster, glancing at the clock. This whole dinner was breaking her Mama's cardinal rule: don't hurry. She thought if a cook was in a hurry, you might as well just make a sandwich and go on your way. — Mary Jane Hathaway

I'm always slightly embarrassed to meet other actresses of my vintage. We have so little in common. They're all so dedicated. I find - so desperate. — Paulette Goddard

[on Paulette Goddard] It was her honesty I liked. — Veronica Lake

She said something in Kiowa in a happy tone. My name is Ay-ti-Podle, the Cicada, whose song means there is a fruit ripening nearby. She gestured back toward the big bay saddle horse and tossed her hair back. It was as if she wanted to include Pasha in this newfound happiness. — Paulette Jiles

For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can't know if beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent. — Paulette Jiles

I don't accept flowers. I take nothing perishable. — Paulette Goddard

She let them go all night and in the mornings would find them coming toward her where she slept, with that alert and nervous air unridden horses always have at dawn. They are remembering some far time when predators came for them at first light. So they came toward her with the strange and painful air of fallen angels, treading carefully and slowly as if the earth were foreign soil. — Paulette Jiles

not everything green is gold. Not every finished puzzle is complete. And for every misplaced jigsaw, there is a puzzle out there still holding your space. Finally, after one search ends, a new one always begins. Always. — Paulette Benjamin

Listen to Paulette's description of her own values development, and you will begin to understand her uncommon strengths and — Thomas D. Kuczmarski

A thin watery sun laid its gunmetal shine on the country below. — Paulette Jiles

Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage. — Paulette Jiles

Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands. — Paulette Jiles

Loss of reputation and the regard of our fellow persons is in any society, from Iceland to Malaysia, a terrible blow to the spirit. It is worse than being penniless and more cutting than the blades of enemies. — Paulette Jiles

It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing. — Paulette Jiles

Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten. — Paulette Jiles

but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself. — Paulette Jiles

More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. — Paulette Jiles

Anne DeGrace is a gifted story teller and Far From Home contains some of her most intriguing characters. Thoroughly enjoyable. — Paulette Jiles

I am not temperamental. I just know what I want and if I don't have it, I try to get it. — Paulette Goddard

Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed. He — Paulette Jiles

Home, as far as I'm concerned, is the place you have to leave. And then, if you're like me, spend the rest of your life mourning. — Paulette Alden