Anna Godbersen Quotes

There was plenty of life left and if he had to he would use it all to get her back. The time had passed for making promises to her-all that was left for him was to act.

I've always believed in savoring the moments. In the end, they are the only things we'll have.

Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

She considered herself unconventional.

THE LUXE IS . . . Pretty girls in pretty dresses, partying until dawn. Irresistible boys with mischievous smiles and dangerous intentions. White lies, dark secrets, and scandalous hookups. This is Manhattan in 1899.

Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl's time.

Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.

Things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

It is a truth universally acknowledge that there will always be a gentleman to dance with, except at just the moment when you require one most.

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,' he said.

She was full of some strange energy that morning. Her every movement had purpose and life and she seemed to find satisfaction in every little thing.

Already she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go, and she knew that it was enought to bury her alive.

Heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery.

Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.

Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.

We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.

Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.

As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.

It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.

Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes.

She was a vision in a white gown her dark hair forming a hazy halo around her rosy heart-shaped face. Her long lashes fluttered to touch her cheeks and then her eyes opened fully in his direction. Her small round mouth flexed in an immediate and knowing smile. That's the girl I'm going to marry Henry thought.

It seemed to her as though everything that was good and true had been blasted out of the world. All those things had been crushed destroyed made to disappear.

A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.

Diana knew it wouldn't be right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams. The girls of 1929.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.

A young woman, newly wed, may find herself in the delightful position of wanting to do nothing without the company of her darling husband. She may indeed discover that she spends all her waking hours with her fellow to the exclusion of every other friend or family member. This is understandable, but wholly unacceptable, to society.

But in that moment she realized how false most smiles were and what a tremendous waste of time.

They were all dressed in their finest as though life really were some magical stage play in which every moment ought to be illuminated with its own bright spotlight.

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Ah well that I can't tell you." Diana ducked her head so that the brim of her bonnet covered her face. "Some things must remain a mystery and for now I think I'll keep my opinion of you and your compliments to myself.

She had had no idea what it would do to her seeing him in a suit.

So this was betrayal. It was like being left alone in the desert at dusk without water or warmth. It left your mouth dry and will broken. It sapped your tears and made you hollow.

Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.

So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.

Even when a girl is married she still never completely leaves her mother and father's home.

Don't go looking for boys in the dark They will say pretty things then leave you with scars. Do go looking for boys in the park For that is where the true gentlemen are.

Living too much in one's head can be dangerous.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

Henry turned his hat in his hands but went on looking at Diana in a way that made her want to crawl into his arms and stay there forever.

Her heart the damned thing had begun to race and she only hoped that the rapid inflation and deflation of her chest wasn't visible beneath her fitted bodice.

After Henry's treatment of her she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

She should have know that villains often come with pretty faces.

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.

She was trying to sound tough and impatient, but she knew that vulnerable desire to be wooed was still brimming in her tone.

She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.

You love her," Teddy observed quietly. Henry replied with an uncharacteristic lack of irony: "Yes." Teddy's eyes shifted to the plaster interlacing that decorated the ceiling in curlicues. "Lord, you never make it easy, do you." "No.