Nancy Horan > Quotes

“Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“...but when you have a gift, it isn't yours to keep to yourself. It's the reason you're here. It's your purpose.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“I'm like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose." she told him. "I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. -Loving Frank”
― Nancy Horan

“There's a phrase over the door; she called to him. "Haec est porta coeli."..."Here is the gate to heaven.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“I love you so much. I love you enough that I want to stay separate from you. You're an extraordinary man, Frank Wright. I could so easily lose myself in your world and never make a world of my own. And where would that leave us? We'd both be bored stupid.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“To fare on - fusing the self that wakes and the self that dreams.”
― Nancy Horan

“How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“She had found more than peace of mind. She had discovered the state of her soul set down in ink.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky--'the hem of heaven.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“Together greet life's solemn real.
Together own one glad ideal,
Together laugh, together ache,
And think one thought- "Each other's sake,"
And hope one hope- in new-world weather,
To still go on, and go together.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else... books.”
― Nancy Horan

“You simply have to move forward despite all the notions about how we are supposed to be.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“Did all women married to well-known men struggle for recognition?”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“Take my love for granted," he said, "and I shall do the same for you.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“I don't buy junk. When I buy something, it's got to be perfection or I don't want it. You won't find me coming home with five cheap suits, one for each day of the week. I'd rather have one perfect suit or none.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“When both lovers yearn to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection, this is the highest form of love possible between a man and a woman....To experience such love is to feel oneself doubled. Such feeling liberates and deepens the personality, inspires us to noble deeds and works of genius.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“What a morning," Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. "I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again.”
― Nancy Horan

“Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank

“Places like Edinburgh seemed staid and passé compared to, say, Chicago, where a man could capitalize upon his native talents in grand fashion, regardless of who his father was. In the scheme of things, it was hard not to feel some jealousy that America was on the ascent, and Europe was wallowing in decline, thanks to its own bad behavior. Judging”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.”
― Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky

“If Catherine would just let go' had been their mantra for so long. Now Mamah understood Catherine's dilemma better. She wouldn't divorce Frank because she feared he wouldn't pay her child support and alimony. And there was revenge to be sure: By refusing to divorce after twenty years of accommodating him, Catherine was squeezing recompense from Frank for a longstanding emotional debt. But that was only part of it. Catherine held on because she still loved him, and remembered what it was like to be loved by him. Nothing else in the world compared to the incandescent joy Frank brought to his best beloved.”
― Nancy Horan, Loving Frank