Top 71 Melanie Benjamin Quotes
#1. How does one know that, before the first hello? It's a heaviness in the air combined with a lightness of step. It's a slowing down of the past, and a speeding up of the future.
Melanie Benjamin
#2. I resigned myself to looking for that face that I clearly recalled - until the day when I couldn't. It happened so suddenly.
Melanie Benjamin
#3. I also enjoyed praying at night for forgiveness, secure in the knowledge I'd not really done anything in need of forgiving.
Melanie Benjamin
#4. His death notice included the mention that in 1880, he had married Alice in Wonderland. I like to think he would have been pleased at that, but the truth is he was the only one to whom this didn't matter at all.
Melanie Benjamin
#5. Only the weak need ... heroes ... and heroes need ... those around them to remain weak.
Melanie Benjamin
#6. she knew the effort it took to keep one's exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it. So
Melanie Benjamin
#7. 'it's not that you are too small, my little chick,but rather that the world is too big.
Melanie Benjamin
#8. Sit up straight." "Don't fidget." "Write a thank-you note the minute you receive a gift or return home from a party." "Always have fresh flowers, no matter the cost." "Clean gloves and shoes are the sign of a lady." "Never let the help get the upper hand." "Be discreet." "Be above gossip.
Melanie Benjamin
#9. All of this was mine, simply for agreeing to marry a man I did not love but who was, in the end, the only man who had ever asked.
Melanie Benjamin
#10. My breath sour against my fist, which I still held to my mouth as if this was a sorrow that could be stifled.
Melanie Benjamin
#11. Dana taught me that the ability to grieve deeply also meant that a person had the capacity to love deeply, laugh deeply, live deeply
and that this was a capacity to be cherished.
Melanie Benjamin
#12. There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.
Melanie Benjamin
#13. Babe Paley simply never made an empty gesture, and here she was, assembling a parade of them. But her feet, her hands, her mind, her heart, were all restless. Truman.
Melanie Benjamin
#14. It was her style, that indefinable asset. It was said that the others had style but Babe was style.
Melanie Benjamin
#15. Were we women always destined to appear as we were not, as long as we were standing next to our husbands?
Melanie Benjamin
#16. Marriage breeds its own special brand of loneliness, and it's far more cruel. You miss more, because you've known more.
Melanie Benjamin
#17. I will fly, alone. Wearing my own pair of goggles, my view of the world just as unique, just as wonderful, and his was, but different. Mine.
Melanie Benjamin
#18. Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering.
Melanie Benjamin
#19. Despite all that I had taught, I had learned nothing about the world.
Melanie Benjamin
#20. What need was there for words, when we had just shared the sky?
Melanie Benjamin
#21. Days are very mysterious things, of course. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours.
Melanie Benjamin
#22. Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters.
Melanie Benjamin
#23. His eyes were so blue as to be startling; I decided I'd never seen blue eyes before, until that moment. They were the color of morning, the color of the ocean; the color of the sky.
Melanie Benjamin
#24. Unlike men, women got less sintimental as we aged, I was discovering. We cried enough, when we were young; vessels overflowing with the tears of everyone we loved.
Melanie Benjamin
#25. Never before had I imagined leaving home, but that wasn't because of lack of desire, only lack of possibility.
Melanie Benjamin
#26. Why, then, did I always feel as if his happiness was my responsibility? It wasn't fair for him to burden me with that. It had never been fair.
Melanie Benjamin
#27. I still can't stop marveling that this same boy chose me; and I'm glad that I can't, for we should rejoice in being seen, needed. Loved.
Melanie Benjamin
#28. To live for oneself is a terrifying prospect; there is comfort in martyrdom ...
p 364
Melanie Benjamin
#29. My dear, simple little sister! Every mood so fleeting, yet so obvious; there was no mystery to Minnie, none at all. She loved whom she knew, distrusted everyone else, and shared her emotions, her thoughts, as freely as they occurred to her.
Melanie Benjamin
#30. We are in receipt of numerous communications concerning the Harper's Ferry affair, and the various topics connected with it ...
We must decline to publish them all,-simply because we see no possible good which they could accomplish.
Melanie Benjamin
#31. I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren't explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.
Melanie Benjamin
#32. Why were there so many barriers between us, always? Barriers of clothing, of etiquette, of time and age and reason.
Melanie Benjamin
#34. At times I couldn't recognize my own words, because I was still so often afraid in my life.
Melanie Benjamin
#35. Contemplation, rather than action; that seemed to be my lot in life, and I was ashamed of it even as I craved it.
Melanie Benjamin
#36. Both black and gleaming, ostentatiously so. I was acutely aware of our luggage piling up on the platform, matching and initialed and gleaming with comfortable wealth. I couldn't help but
Melanie Benjamin
#37. I knew that no matter what I said, it would not be enough; when you're on the other side of the looking glass, nothing is as it seems.
Melanie Benjamin
#38. What very mysterious things days were. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours. There's quite a lot we don't know about them.
Melanie Benjamin
#39. Now there were no more stories to tell, to soothe, to comfort, to draw strangers close together; to link like hearts and minds.
Melanie Benjamin
#40. No, this was the career I wanted; a writer could be employed for as long as she could hold a pencil; for as long as her mind still held out. But an actress - even an actress like Mary - had a fleeting shelf life.
Melanie Benjamin
#41. Dreams may have been the paintings on my walls, but doubts and fears were the bars on my windows.
Melanie Benjamin
#42. So now he was throwing a party. The most swellegant, elegant party evah.
Melanie Benjamin
#43. And this was the greatest gift that aviation could ever give me; not the sense of freedom but the sense of permanence, coupling, of being absolutely worthy, absolutely necessary to the one person in the world who hadn't needed anyone. Before.
Melanie Benjamin
#44. Wonderland was all we had in common, after all; Wonderland was what was denied the two of us. I had denied him his; he had denied me mine.
Melanie Benjamin
#45. A woman's life, always changing, accommodating, then shedding, old duties for new; one person's expectations for another until finally, victoriously, emerging stronger. Complete.
Melanie Benjamin
#46. Would my son love me, when he was old enough to know what love meant?
p 181
Melanie Benjamin
#47. I did not want to be forgotten. More than that, I wanted, desperately - I fell to my knees and began to tear out the weeds, the vines, by their very roots - to be remembered.
Melanie Benjamin
#48. Now and adult, allowed a glimpse of these first cracks in my family's perfect surface, I couldn't help but wonder what else I didn't understand about us all.
p 60
Melanie Benjamin
#49. Sorrow was my constant companion, even though I no longer wept. It was the shadow that followed me on sunny days, the weight pressing down upon my spirits on cloudy ones.
Melanie Benjamin
#50. Afraid of everything because nothing truly terrible had happened to me, yet.
Melanie Benjamin
#51. Still, we all found it easier to love and admire him when he was gone. The
Melanie Benjamin
#52. But they all recognized the steady, no-nonsense influence Jack had had on Truman; he was the ballast to Truman's airy sails.
Melanie Benjamin
#53. That's just it, don't you see? I don't want to be taken care of! I don't want be hidden away, a burden! I want to make my own way! To have a greater purpose!'
Melanie Benjamin
#54. All his smiles were just a little sad around the edges, as if he knew happiness never could last very long
Melanie Benjamin
#55. The moment before he started to suspect that there were punishments for those who dared to dream so big, to fly so high.
Melanie Benjamin
#56. When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.
Melanie Benjamin
#58. Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.
Melanie Benjamin
#59. My intellect, my wit - I'd forgotten I'd even possessed them, and they were dull and neglected, to be sure. But in the company of others who prized thought over action, laughter over brooding, they blossomed and sharpened. My tongue fairly tripped with sparkling phrases, insightful comments.
Melanie Benjamin
#60. Just when had I become so self-absorbed? I was a form of self-preservation, I realized now; I had resolved that ... I could survive Colonel Wood's cruelty if my heart, my mind, had shrunk to a size designed to absorb my own troubles only.
Melanie Benjamin
#61. My head grew muddled with it all; the silly ways adults acted with one another, never saying what they meant, trusting in sighs and glances and distance to speak for them instead. How dangerous that was! How easy it must be to misinterpret a sigh or a look.
Melanie Benjamin
#62. For I can think of no fate drearier than sitting at home ... for the rest of my life, watching all of you go off one by one.
Melanie Benjamin
#63. At the age of twenty-five, he had conquered not only the entire planet but all the sky above it.
Melanie Benjamin
#64. The girls we'd believed to have been lost in the haze of regret and recrimination that comes with surviving in the unscrupulous business; this unjust world. But it turned out they'd been here all along, these two; caught forever in a shared moment, preserved together in a silver frame.
Melanie Benjamin
#65. I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.
Melanie Benjamin
#66. I suppose at some point, we all have to decide which memories - real or otherwise - to hold on to, and which ones to let go.
Melanie Benjamin
#67. Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead I would define it.
Melanie Benjamin
#68. I saw myself through her eyes, I saw myself through Charles's eyes, always; I never looked into a mirror and saw myself through my own. So I did, one evening after a couple of glasses of Dubonnet.
Melanie Benjamin
#69. But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.
Melanie Benjamin
#70. It was early in their friendship, those days when they had to catch each other up on everything that had happened to them, so that they could mark their lives - Before. And After.
Melanie Benjamin
#71. I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.
Melanie Benjamin
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