Sandra Newman Quotes

“It was beautiful to be heartbroken, it was as pleasurable as a thing could be. But pointless.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“At last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“The dream was strongest of all when Kate's heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn't prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“So he thinks he has a baby and everything falls into place? What gets me is, people have babies and they're thinking what the baby will do for them. It's sick.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“For Ben, this all had a sinister feeling, the feeling of a darker time about to begin.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles' light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth's fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia's memory and passed on.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Nonetheless, it left him with a terrible doubt, a fear that inhabited every scene.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“But this was reality, occluded and delicate.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“The dream was greater than a dream. It was a greater life than life.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She could hide in this small, dull life.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“To Ben's eye, there were no apparent signs of wealth, though he wasn't sure what he'd expected. Fountains?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Her sadness was an ecstasy, a guilt, an assignation.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“. . . while the world became the something else of dreams, of books, of Kate.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“In fact, whenever Ben thought about it, his worry would slowly evaporate. But when he didn't think about it, it niggled and made him need to think about it again.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She added in a tight, defensive voice that she panicked when she did jobs, it gave her existential panic. She could do them for a while, but it felt like darning socks in a burning building. Time was running out and . . . Did he ever get that?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Outdoors; everything one might dream. The fairy-gray clouded sky and the fairy-green misted wood. Her tall horse shying at a sparkling brook. All dreams.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Then it cleared: farther down the hallway, a door had opened on a flourish of sunlight. Into the light stepped a youth, white and gold, a celestial apparition—the Earl of Southampton. His face was beardless still, the eyes pale blue and with the lashless look of redheads. His auburn tresses, artfully curled, fell almost to his elbows. He was six feet tall and lovely as a waterfall, as pretty as a flowering tree. White silk, white velvet, cloth of gold. A gold filigree earring in one ear. Emilia knew him from her days of attendance on the Queen: an uncanny, androgynous youth with the despotic pout of the beautiful, who can never be sufficiently loved.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“He laughed and came forward impulsively to kiss her—his affection a potent thing, a flourish of light. She was smiling, her tears feeling fresh on her face. He smelled of sweat and roses. She felt it in the palms of her hands, in her loins. It was right. It was Southampton she had wanted all along.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“But he was left with the all-too-familiar feeling of having been infected by insanity, of being drawn into someone else's insanity.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“There can be no friendship between our peoples. We live in your nightmares, and you are but our dreams.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Some days, she was pain incarnate. She would suffer all day and he would try to cheer her up and fail, and he felt like an irrelevant gnat.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“The maidservants all were in love with Southampton, in a rapt, unhoping way, like a tribe of poets in love with the moon; one would have a fit of tears, then it spread to another and another, until all the house heaved with love's calamity.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She was alone like a cat, like an owl, as if she walked unobserved, out of her human life.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“It was a white pandemonium with the wrong past.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“It was as if they had never been apart.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens