Julienne Reid

“I’m in love, aren’t I? She thought she knew the answer by how much she wanted to be there. Wouldn’t have traded being there for any other location in the world. Wouldn’t have traded it for all the exotic destinations flaunted in Pan Am travel brochures. Not Tahiti, not Monte Carlo, not Hong Kong. No, she wanted to be here, in this ramshackle market not a ten-minute drive from her humdrum house and life. Except it wasn’t a humdrum life anymore, was it? No, I’m at the most exciting place on Earth. The center of the world. The Roman Forum during the reign of Augustus Caesar.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“She had always thought that people who had once loved one another kept the faintest trace of it in their being, but not him. He was free of her. Marked of course, but free in a way that she was not. She was still joined by fear, by sexual necessity, by what she knew as love.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet—Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z. And I know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels

“She was beautiful. Not despite her so-called flaws but because of them—those scrapes and life experiences that made her body like no other woman’s. The beauty that wasn’t ephemeral or society-dictated but the real beauty that cut across generations, across all cultures, from the beginning of humankind. The beauty that was painted in Paleolithic caves and carved in ancient Venus statuettes, those wonderful figurines of all shapes and sizes, individualized and gorgeous precisely because of that individuality. What cavemen had known, modern men had forgotten, and sadly, modern women too.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen