Anne Rivers Siddons > Quotes

“Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Fault Lines

“That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness...”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mornings, and the old kitchen around me, and Aurelia's gold smile and quick hands and eyes rich with love for me.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you'll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that's me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that's me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie, that's me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that's me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that's me, sure as gun's iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that's Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that's Forrest, and I'm right behind him. Never see me again? You'll never not see me. And I'll never not see you . . .Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Fault Lines

“I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Sweetwater Creek

“The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Off Season

“You wouldn't maintain a house like that' you'd feet it and water it. You'd have to give it nourishment and love it to keep it alive and healthy.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Everything about it and the fierce old coast around it, had the ring and taste and feel of utter rightness to me. Its peace and loneliness crept into my veins and ran there, its wildness called out to the deep buried wildness in my heart.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Outer Banks

“I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, 'It is like drinking stars'.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait.

Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“They are love, those rare blinding early friendships. Not everyone has them, and almost no one gets more than one. The others, the later ones, are not the same. These first grow in a soil found only in the country of the young and are possible only there, because their medium is unbroken time and proximity and discovery. Later, there is not enough of any of those for the total, ongoing immersions that these friendships are...These friendships may continue past first youth, but I don't think they often do. Their primary strength is that fire of exploration and validation. The friend becomes a cicerone, to go with you down to the bottom of your deepest depths and out to the farthest crannies of your being. All your senses are open, all your reservoirs fill up at a prodigious rate, all your motors hum.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Outer Banks

“Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“...bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“It was lovely wine, soft and full of flowers.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“At four that morning my son, Peter Williams Chambliss, slid into the world tiny and red and roaring with life and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“(voice)...it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“I fell in love with Peter at that precise instant. I don't suppose many other women know the exact moment the rest of their lives began.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Colony

“Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Sweetwater Creek

“...and turned his eyes the color of a winter sea.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...leaving the air crystal and sweet and the dusty, used leaves sparkling. The lake surface was a diamond-dusted, dancing indigo...”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town

“...and I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“I grew as fussy and particular about where to put what, which books should lie where, what cushion should grace what corner as a little old maiden lady. I think that it was partly because there was so little space and I had so few things to mess about with; at home, where the flotsam and jetsam of all our lives and years was as abundant as dust, it was possible only to try and contain it all, never mind arranging it. Here, in this sparsity of space and objects, I found that I cared inordinately what trinket or pillow or vase went where, what color book jacket sat next to another.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Up Island: A Moving Chick Lit Story of Southern Family Struggles and Renewal on Martha's Vineyard

“There was no moon at all, and a faint silver peppering of starts fardly showed through the scrim of high clouds. The sea itself seemed to give off light, a spectral, colorless light that was more like the sea's breath. The night was soft and thick and black and warm as velvet, silky on my skin, smelling of iodine and salt and crepe myrtle and that ineffable, skin-prickling saline emanation that says 'ocean' to me whenever I smell it, hundreds of miles inland. It always moves me close to tears, so visceral, so old and tidal is its pull. I have often thought that it is the first smell we know, the amniotic smell of our first, secret sea.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, Down Town