Robin Oliveira > Quotes

“In some ways I liked the struggle better, I think. It clarified what was important.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“And even if something had once been committed to paper, did it mean that it was still true? Always true? Unlike the relative permanence of paint, words were temporal. You uttered them and they evanesced, but if you wrote them, they remained, though whether the written word was any more truthful than the spoken was a mystery to her. Only paint was honest.”
― Robin Oliveira, I Always Loved You

“For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“Love and war, it seemed, worked by the same rules. One had to hurry, before the fires flared out.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“Both carried, despite their martial postures, an aura of sorrow, though ghosts of smiles flickered across their faces. They would have recognized one another from a mere turn of the head observed from hundreds of yards away on a moonless night in January.”
― Robin Oliveira

“How women defeat one another; how need defeats women.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“Choose who you are, he whispered into her ear. Choose who you'll be.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“Why is it that voices break hearts?”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name Is Mary Sutter

“There came a time when she was no longer a petite woman that courtesy demanded they hear out; instead, she became the woman who might actually save them.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“Sometimes, he felt himself not so much at his wit’s end, but witless.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“But I will only be able to claim it if I am offered it. Tell me, Dr. Blevens, in your opinion, is there a limit to how much knowledge one person is allowed to accumulate? Have I reached my quota?”
― Robin Oliveira

“Form was a matter of precise measurement. Without the underpinning of accurate scaffolding, no piece of artwork succeeded. But for all of that, art was instinct, too. One felt the balance or imbalance. The revelation was something akin to a religious experience: You didn’t know the truth and then you suddenly knew it, and because of it everything was transformed.”
― Robin Oliveira, I Always Loved You

“Envy and fear make people unkind.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“The body was a structure, yes, with struts and piping, but something else, some miraculous, invisible fabric made it work.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility. Irony lost in the blind pursuit of cacophonous righteousness. I wish to be free, but you may not be free. What he hated most was that they could not see the inherent cruelty in their economy. Their slaves’ skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“If you are going to abandon your work because someone speaks ill of it, then it has never been your work, has it? It becomes theirs. You give it up.”
― Robin Oliveira, I Always Loved You

“Mary thought that the art of love might just be blindness: the willingness not to see the truth of anything, to blur life's sharp edges and drift on an impression of one's own making, to act as if the life you lived was the life you wanted.”
― Robin Oliveira

“Every inch toward courage was a decision. Even ten feet on her own would be a triumph. The line between coercion and choice for her was the line between darkness and light.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“Only a mother, Mary thought, could render a grown woman or man a child again, even if only for a moment.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“What was it about the world that it could not face the reality it lived?”
― Robin Oliveira

“Something sparked the body to live, propelled the heart to beat, the brain to think, the structure to live on,”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“He had not wanted to tell her that happiness was the province of the young, that with each passing year you lose your hold on it, that it was as fleeting a pleasure as the falling stars.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“Stop it, Mame. That’s enough self-pity,” Robert said. He stood, resting his hands on the edge of the dining table. “What is the matter with you? If you are going to abandon your work because someone speaks ill of it, then it has never really been your work, has it? It becomes theirs. You give it up. Do you want to do that? Your work is different; you declare it so; you want it to be so. But you cannot expect the world to understand when you ask them to look at work that is different than what they are used to seeing. The human mind is not equipped to adapt so rapidly. People have been told for so long what is good by the École des Beaux Arts that when something new comes along, they cannot adjust their thinking. Your work doesn’t look anything like what they have been told is good. Ergo, your pictures must be bad. It’s confused logic, but logic nonetheless. And it will alter with time. You must give it time. Why yield your confidence to a bunch of jackals?”
― Robin Oliveira, I Always Loved You

“Theirs was a tenacious kind of love, as solid and true as granite. Neither of them could think of a time in their life together when either had let the other down.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“When love drives change, doubt can have no place.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“Why was it, Mary thought, that beauty and horror always met side by side, magnifying one other?”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“what Lee and Jefferson Davis didn’t understand was that to destroy a union founded on freedom was to declare all of humanity’s endeavors foolhardy.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“One day, she had been temperate, and the next she had fallen into excess and there had stayed.”
― Robin Oliveira, Winter Sisters

“God’s work, then, and whether God existed or not, he would act as if He did, on faith, for he could deduce no other reason in the end for man’s existence.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter

“Her hand was calloused and the nails ragged and broken; it felt heavy in his, like responsibility.”
― Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter