Top 100 Beatriz Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel.”

— Beatriz Williams

52. “No matter what your sins, if a dog can stand you, there must be some hope left for your soul.”

— Beatriz Williams

53. “I’m wearing one of Clara’s hats, which are much smarter than mine, close and brimless like a cap. Isn’t it funny, how a smart new hat gives you moral strength?”

— Beatriz Williams

54. “Love, like a chicken salad or a restaurant hash, must be taken with blind faith or it loses its flavor.”

— Beatriz Williams

55. “What would that be like, not to give a damn what the other women think?”

— Beatriz Williams

56. “In despair, our heroine swallows poison, and reaches for some older, sturdier fellow to heal her, only to discover that she cannot absorb sturdiness through her skin, she cannot replace one person with another. She cannot actually make love by making love.”

— Beatriz Williams

57. “Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man. – HELEN ROWLAND.”

— Beatriz Williams

58. “You lay down these tracks, even though you know it’s not the right track, even though you can see what track’s the right one. But you don’t know how to get off yours. You know how you want to behave, what you want to be, the change you need to make – the thing you need to stop doing, or start doing – and yet you stay on your old track. You can’t find the switch that takes you to the other one. You can see the change, the desired state, but you can’t quite touch it.”

— Beatriz Williams

59. “What makes you Vivian.′ I liked the way he said my name, all throaty on the V’s, all stretched to its rightful three syllables.”

— Beatriz Williams

60. “I am inside your skin, he whispered. I am reading your thoughts. What am I thinking? That you have fallen in love with me all over again. That you love my scars and my sinful habits, and my loyal heart that beats for you. That you want me to make another baby inside you, so there is no chance God will put us asunder again.”

— Beatriz Williams

61. “You have a softa?′ ‘Somewhere underneath all these boxes.’ ‘These boxes you won’t unpack.’ ‘I will now.’ Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling. I will now. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too.”

— Beatriz Williams

62. “It’s always different, isn’t it, until it turns out to be the same.”

— Beatriz Williams

63. “She loved too much. She staked everything on people she loved. When they were gone, it destroyed her.”

— Beatriz Williams

64. “Now’s your chance, Lily. Remember to ask him about himself. They love that. And for God’s sake don’t talk about books.”

— Beatriz Williams

65. “If you simply go on having passionate affairs, you never have to give it up. It’s like being in love constantly, for ever and ever, only with different people.”

— Beatriz Williams

66. “I thought I’d traveled into another universe. I thought I’d stepped into another Earth entirely, a paradise lit by an eternal sun, a release from everything old, everything dreary. Then I touched land and discovered that freedom was not so straightforward, that you could move to a different universe but you couldn’t escape the prison of your own skin.”

— Beatriz Williams

67. “Graham Pendleton is tall, athletic, charming, glamorously handsome. He excels at all sports, even the ones he hasn’t tried.”

— Beatriz Williams

68. “You know something? The oddest picture came into my mind just then. I saw Dadums in the chair in the hospital waiting room, cradling my mother’s sleeping head on his lap, raising his finger to his lips so no one would disturb her. And. I heard Violet’s voice in my ears, as kind and clean as water: He loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another person. I thought, out of the blue, maybe this isn’t so hard after all. Maybe.”

— Beatriz Williams

69. “It’s better that way, don’t you think? You’re prepared to like anything when you’re comfortable sauced.”

— Beatriz Williams

70. “I think I’ve done a reasonable job of conforming to the conventions of this world. I’ve made adjustments, I’ve modernized, I’ve adapted. But one thing I refuse to concede is my right to punch the lights out of any man who dares to insult you. Not because you’re helpless; God knows you’re not. But because no man can stand by idly and see his idol defamed.”

— Beatriz Williams

71. “Except for a daily visit with the other doctors on our morning rounds, I hadn’t seen or spoken to him. But that didn’t mean I didn’t miss him like the winter earth missed the sun.”

— Beatriz Williams

72. “His scorn was so huge, Violet could have reached out and grabbed a fistful of it.”

— Beatriz Williams

73. “Don’t smoke, Aunt Julie,” I said. “Mother will smell it when she comes back in.” “I don’t happen to give a damn.”

— Beatriz Williams

74. “I like the peace, you see. If there is disorder, it is hard for the spirit to be peaceful.”

— Beatriz Williams

75. “I can look at a thing and know its worth in a second. It’s my particular talent.”

— Beatriz Williams

76. “I wanted the rattle of New York around me, I wanted stink and strangers and the sour dank air of the IRT clutching me to its bosom. I wanted hustle and bustle. I wanted to know that millions of lives were playing out at my doorstep, and not one of them gave a damn about my little problems.”

— Beatriz Williams

77. “The word accountant turned a switch in people’s brains, so that anything else you said just made a garbled Blah bla-bla-blah in the air, like Charlie Brown’s teacher.”

— Beatriz Williams

78. “Besides, it seems to me, since my pleasure is more or less a foregone conclusion, the main object of the exercise ought to be your pleasure. A rather elusive creature, I’ve heard. Fascinating sort of quarry.′ ‘Wait a minute. You’re hunting down my orgasms?’ His laughter burst out like a rifle salute. ‘Kate. You damned magnificent creature.’ He rolled onto his back, bringing me with him. ‘Yes, my darling. That’s exactly what I’d like to do, on and on until the end of my life.”

— Beatriz Williams

79. “I was hazy with wine, hazy with Nick. I nestled into my seat and marveled at his endlessness, only inches away, his infinite capacity to shelter me.”

— Beatriz Williams

80. “I didn’t reply I didn’t think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you’re overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.”

— Beatriz Williams

81. “Vati, Vati, I miss you so. She didn’t say it aloud, but her throat vibrated with the words.”

— Beatriz Williams

82. “Love. Really, it’s responsible for the most vulgar excesses.”

— Beatriz Williams

83. “A man never knows how to say good-bye; a woman never knows when to say it. – HELEN ROWLAND.”

— Beatriz Williams

84. “I had the best of times. I’m not the sort of chap who’s going to grovel on about what a stupid, callow fool he was in his salad days, how it was all a great waste of time, nothing but ruination.”

— Beatriz Williams

85. “I was not falling in love; I was certainly not falling in love. Love was a fiction, written by Nature to disguise her real purpose. This sick, breathless sensation in my belly was only biology. This heat on my nerves. Only the instinct to procreate. Or something else, maybe. The recognition of imminent danger.”

— Beatriz Williams

86. “You must find whatever ugliness there exists within him and have the courage to extract it, like a bad tooth, or if it cannot be extracted to actually journey inside him and gather the ugliness in your arms for metamorphosis, by the strength and the purity of your love to make him beautiful again.”

— Beatriz Williams

87. “Across the road, at the edge of the yellow beach, an especially large wave rises to the sky, gathering strength and power, until it can’t bear the strain any longer and dives for shore in a long, elegant undulation, from north to south. An instant later, the boom reaches us, like the firing of a seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell – a sound I know all too well. My nerves flinch obediently.”

— Beatriz Williams

88. “She zipped her lips.”

— Beatriz Williams

89. “Honey, you always have a choice,” she says. “The trick is making the right one.”

— Beatriz Williams

90. “Listen to me, Violet. I want more than this. I want to lie next to you at night and worship you. I want to watch you by day and see what you’re capable of, you astonishing woman, you bloody beautiful thing. I want to count every scintillation of you.”

— Beatriz Williams

91. “Here’s the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.”

— Beatriz Williams

92. “Only the rich deserve the fair.”

— Beatriz Williams

93. “Didn’t It belong to her just a little bit, not in a material way but in the way a house always belonged to all those who have lived and loved and suffered in it? As if it had kept behind a small part of your soul.”

— Beatriz Williams

94. “What about the look in your eyes?′ ‘God knows. I was just trying to make you better.’ ‘Well, you did that. You’ve always done that. Now, go to bed. I don’t dare help you. It’s all I can do right now, just looking at you, falling out of my dressing gown like that.”

— Beatriz Williams

95. “We can’t all be Einstein, can we? The world need brawn as well as brain. And the girls certainly don’t mind, do they? I mean, what self-respecting woman wants a man hanging around who’s smarter than she is?”

— Beatriz Williams

96. “Books, after all, were expensive, and it was better to eat than read. So the little shelf in Sophie’s bedroom contained a selection of volumes amassed lovingly over successive birthdays and Christmases, and the idea of an entire gilded library, old and venerable, covered with the fingerprints of one’s ancestors, never needing to be returned to it’s rightful owner-why, it stole her will!”

— Beatriz Williams

97. “Listen and love and support and whatever you can. But you can’t expect to save them. You can’t hold yourself responsible for their choices.”

— Beatriz Williams

98. “You never knew for certain if a man was a hero or a villain or an ordinary human being.”

— Beatriz Williams

99. “Ahead, an old barn sheds paint into the grass.”

— Beatriz Williams

100. “Do you know what I love most about the ocean? The way the water’s all connected. The bits and pieces have different names, but really it’s all one vast body of salt water, all the way around the earth. It’s as if we’re touching Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic. If you close your eyes, you can feel it, like it’s right there.” Pepper.”

— Beatriz Williams