Plume

“Always when I play back my father’s voice,” Maria says, “it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.”
― Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields

“...one should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady