Great Throughts Treasury

"As I get older, I use less jewelry - necklace or earrings each morning, not both; my clothes are getting more basic - fewer colors and simpler cuts; and my make-up is stripped back to basics."

"As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next."

"Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London."

"Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event."

"Everybody asks the same questions -- but they don't know that they ask the same questions."

"But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide"

"A firefly landed on Honor?s sleeve and began walking up her shoulder, its tail still blinking. As she craned her neck to look down at it, Jack chuckled. Don?t be scared. It?s just a lightning bug. He placed his finger in its path. Honor tried not to think about the pressure of his touch. When the firefly crawled onto his finger, he lifted it up and let it fly off, signaling its escape route with sparks of light."

"Fanny was having all the time what I experienced only the once with Colonel Birch in the orchard. I had my fame to comfort me, and the money it brought in, but that only went so far. I could not hate Fanny, for it were my fault she was crippled. But I could not ever feel friendly towards her nor comfortable round her. That was the case with many people in Lyme. I had come unstuck. I would never be a lady like the Philpots?no one would ever call me Miss Mary. I would be plain Mary Anning. Yet"

"He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I."

"He had decided to trust me."

"I did not mind the cold so much when he was there."

"He spoke her name as though he held cinnamon in his mouth."

"I could not think of anything but his fingers on my neck, his thumb on my lips."

"I didn't move. I've learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are."

"He was a collector rather than a hunter, buying his knowledge rather than seeking it with his own eyes and hands. I"

"He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face."

"I did not sleep well that night. I was not used to having the power to affect someone?s life so and did not easily carry its weight, as a man might have done."

"I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be."

"I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening."

"I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home"

"I had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon."

"I find that when I come out of the library I?m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life."

"I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed."

"I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings."

"I have a bed and enough to eat and kind people about me. God is still with me. For these things I am grateful and have no reason to complain"

"I heard voices outside our front door - a woman's, bright as polished brass, and a man's, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur."

"I leaned against the warm brick wall and gazed up. It was a bright, cloudless day, the sky a mocking blue. It was the kind of day when children ran up and down the streets and shouted, when couples walked out through the town gates, past the windmills and along the canals, when old women sat in the sun and closed their eyes. My father was probably sitting on the bench in front of the house, his face turned towards the warmth. Tomorrow night might be bitterly cold, but today it was spring."

"I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat."

"I have noticed that people do not change which feature they lead with, any more than they change in character."

"I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,? she said. ?And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse ? to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.?"

"I knew that he would go out to the tavern, returning with eyes like glittering spoons."

"I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance."

"I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors? families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining."

"I never said I didn't want to marry. It just didn't happen-Iam not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious. Now I am reconciled to being on my own."

"I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favorite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'."

"I spent much of my life in Lyme with my eyes fixed to the ground in search of fossils. Such hunting can limit a person?s perspective."

"It is less distracting in the silence, she said. Sustained silence allows one truly to listen to what is deep inside. We call it waiting in expectation."

"I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that."

"I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached."

"I try to write 1,000 words a day - about three pages. When I reach 1,000 words I feel good. Less than that: a failure. More than that: tired."

"It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily."

"I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when I heard voices outside our front door ? a woman?s, bright as polished brass, and a man?s, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur."

"Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles."

"It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought."

"It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids."

"My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again."

"Margaret grasped on to the magic of novels because they held out hope that Mary?and she herself?might yet have a chance at marriage. While my own experience of life was limited, I knew such a thing would not happen. It hurt, but the truth often does."

"Life itself was far messier and didn?t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match."

"My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain."

"Married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable. I patted my basket. I have my own fossils,"