Violet Winspear > Quotes

“The real aim of romance is to provide escape and entertainment.”
― Violet Winspear

“Love without a little fighting is like potatoes without salt.”
― Violet Winspear, Tender Is The Tyrant

“It isn’t love if it isn’t everything.”
― Violet Winspear, The Glass Castle

“I get my heroes so that they're lean and hard muscled and mocking and sardonic and tough and tigerish and single, of course. Oh and they've got to be rich and then I make it that they're only cynical and smooth on the surface. But underneath they're well, you know, sort of lost and lonely. In need of love but, when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency. Most of my heroes, well all of them really, are like that. They frighten but fascinate. They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it's dangerous to be alone in the room with.”
― Violet Winspear

“At the kernel of every promise, there is always a little doubt, like a fragment of shell that clings to the broken nut.”
― Violet Winspear

“There isn't anything very tender about being in love...it's a cruel and clamouring hunger.”
― Violet Winspear, Desert Doctor

“My passionate puritan!”
― Violet Winspear, Devil in a Silver Room

“Don’t worship saints or sinners, for both demand your soul, and each man’s soul should be his own.”
― Violet Winspear, Satan Took a Bride

“How could you do such a thing to your husband?" Toni looked at Melisande with shocked eyes.
"Quite simply because he bored me. He agreed with everything I ever said, and not once in our four years together did he give me a bruise. He knelt to me when I wanted him to dominate me. He let me make a fool of him with a dozen men, but Luque was, on that point, a perfect Spaniard. He turned his back on me and so I stabbed him!”
― Violet Winspear, Satan Took a Bride

“In their emancipation women are losing what has always made them emotionally superior to men, their tenderness and essential warmth of heart. It’s happening, Jill girl. And men are getting so they don’t care, and when that attitude comes to full flower we’ll maybe have another Roman holiday on our hands, and another age of glory lost under a pall of ashes—”
― Violet Winspear, The Viking Stranger

“I look forward to making you feel the same way. It’s a most enjoyable sensation, like honey in the bones, and if you were a real woman instead of a repressed little English spinster, you would delight in your ability to make a man feel — aroused.’

She backed away from him, feeling a distracted urge to hide herself away from him, as she used to when a child and relatives made a fuss of Alberta because she was much prettier.”
― Violet Winspear, The Awakening of Alice

“Women, mysterious, vulnerable, enticing and full of mixed up loves and hates,’ he drawled. ‘Frail reeds that often survive a storm while male oaks go crashing . . . must I really number you among them just yet, pixie? Can't I go on thinking of you as a charming infant?”
― Violet Winspear, Love's Prisoner

“Do Englishmen like intellectual women?’ she asked.

‘Not if they have any sense, but they have such a high measure of tolerance that it’s likely they endure such women out of sheer gallantry. It would be like kissing a Roget’s Thesaurus!”
― Violet Winspear, Satan Took a Bride

“The cleverest women hide it and create an aura of wit and charm instead. Those who can’t wait a moment to prove how much smarter than men they are--Dios, what bores! A man might as well invite a bearded professor to lunch than a female with all her mental pencils sharpened; instead of being an amusing companion she sits for an examination, gobbling food and words and waving her hands about like a merchant in a bazaar. It is probably the Spaniard in me that dislikes the type!”
― Violet Winspear, Satan Took a Bride

“He strides ahead of many of the other merchant princes. Inborn know-how they call it, but more likely it’s lightning in the blood from the old sea-roving days when Norsemen set out in longboats to plunder whatever took their fancy.

Anyway, men were born to be aggressive and I say hail to the male who isn’t afraid to be one.”
― Violet Winspear, The Viking Stranger

“I work the terraces, Miss Jones. I bring forth the champagne and the wine. I ensure that the chateau remains a perfect example of French architecture. I pay the wages of the workers. I give the orders and flourish the phantom whip, but I am only the caretaker of Satancourt and its cellar.”
― Violet Winspear, Devil in a Silver Room

“A saint likes to be told what he is, but a sinner is a bit touchy.”
― Violet Winspear, Satan Took a Bride

“Never again could she give herself to any man as she had given herself to her husband; completely, as though the world might end before morning came.”
― Violet Winspear, Nurse at Cap Flamingo

“Desire comes easy to a man, but it soon flickers out if love doesn't light the flame.”
― Violet Winspear, Tawny Sands

“She smiled and touched the smattering of silver at his temple, a shyness in her, and yet a new self-possession in her as she came to the realization that love turns a girl into a woman, and a man into a boy.”
― Violet Winspear, Wife Without Kisses

“Love and infatuation are like time and tide. One is forever, the other comes and goes.”
― Violet Winspear, The Tower of the Captive

“I am what I appear to be, Mr Kassandros. I am inhibited and shy, and I don’t go in for swinging affairs and casual abortions. I live a quiet life in my London flat and I work as a commercial artist. I can’t keep a real cat in the old-maid tradition, so I have a china one with a long neck and big eyes. When I can afford a seat at the theatre I go alone, but I lack the gall to sit alone in a restaurant, and our lovely old Lyons Corner Houses have become gambling halls. I also lack whatever it is that men like and I have long since resigned myself to life alone — but if I ever loved a man, it wouldn’t be because he has money, or because he couldn’t make love to me. I’m not frigid! I’m just on guard against being hurt!”
― Violet Winspear, The Awakening of Alice

“What I am is my own business.’

‘Not any more.’ He let his voice sink down meaningfully on the words. ‘You are now my business — mine to control just as I fancy.”
― Violet Winspear, The Awakening of Alice

“These days, young men seemed to flirt with love rather than burn with it.”
― Violet Winspear, The Glass Castle

“Jill was young and untried, but she knew the fundamental truth about women—that love can torment them even as it gives them the moon and the stars to play with.”
― Violet Winspear, The Viking Stranger

“Suddenly all the loneliness was gone and she could surrender herself, her life, all her future, into the keeping of this man…not quite an angel, but not altogether a devil.”
― Violet Winspear, Devil in a Silver Room

“Don’t be a little fool,’ he said curtly. ‘It really is time you started to enjoy being a woman, and if there weren’t enjoyment in it the human race would have come to an end a long time ago.’

‘As if men ever cared one way or the other,’ she rejoined. ‘All most of you care about are sex symbols to gawk at, and maternal types to see after your comforts. I don’t know into what category I fit, unless it’s paramour!”
― Violet Winspear, The Awakening of Alice

“Experience could not be acquired from the innocent, and in a way it is a schooling for the innocence we eventually acquire in a wife. If you have not known the devil you can never appreciate an angel.”
― Violet Winspear, The Tower of the Captive

“As you say, I can feel it and I can smell it, but for me it's still a black rose.”
― Violet Winspear, Love's Agony

“It's an invasion a-and I resent It.'

'A strange remark from a woman,' there was a caustic sting in his voice. 'It is my experience that your sex likes this invasion, as you call it. It is a subtle intrusion they can allow without risking their reputations.”
― Violet Winspear, The Tower of the Captive