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“The anchor symbolizes clarity and courage during chaos and confusion,” my Grand-mere says. “Chaos and Confusion, aren’t those your cats names?” Now I know her story is a delusion.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“I see it like this - people are like the tide. Some come into your life and bring things you'll only need for a short time, and others will bring things you'll carry forever. But some are just destined to disappear beneath the waves.”
― John Marrs, The Vacation

“There's something so beautiful about people who have tasted bitterness but are still determined to savor the sweetness life has to offer. You can sense it in their presence. They have a sense of calm warmth and they refuse to let life take from them. I love these kinds of people - people who have stayed gentle in a world that tried to harden them. They've known darkness but still offer their light to others. Their kindness is real and genuine, never a tactic or a strategy.”
― Case Kenny

“As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I looked around the cabin--its white walls, the linen curtains that puffed in the breeze like sails, paintings of boats and nautical knots. This place, I knew, would not remember me. Already, most traces of my presence had been swept away and scrubbed clean. But what about Jude? I wanted to stain him, like pollen Wanted to press into his skin, Remember me here.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Jude, I would learn, needed not to feel bound to anyone--love with a loose leash. To return not out of obligation but of his own free will, and for me to trust that he would. To Jude, that was love. That trust. He needed my faith in him in order to feel free.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It never occurred to me that I could hurt him, that even a grown man might have a heart still raw in places.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“But I could see it, behind his eyes. Some hurt there. It had never occurred to me that I could hurt him, that even a grown man might have a heart still raw in places.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It's just one of those things. You know how it is.

And of course I didn't, not really, but I nodded along with him because I wanted to seem like a woman who knew something about love and its casualties--and maybe I did. Thinking of my mother and how she would always love my father, no matter how many men and houses and children now separated her from him. She'd remained loyal in her own way. In all that time she'd never remarried. As if she were still waiting for him like a teenager twenty years later, hoping for him to bring roses to her door, to take it all back. How many flowers would that take? There didn't seem to be enough in all the world.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“A rush of pleasure surged through me. This was how it had so often been between us, repartee serving as the language of the heart for us. Where others might whisper little poetries, Stoker and I engaged in badinage, each of us certain that no one else in the world understood us a well a the other.”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Dangerous Collaboration

“If you want too much space for yourself, then don't get too close to people.”
― Garima Soni - words world

“Cyborg is what I and my people call your race.”
“My race? You mean the human race?”
“Yes, precisely. The human race.”
Kanan took in a long breath and coughed at the dryness in her throat. “Why don’t you just call us human?”
“Because,”said Tiqvah, turning away, “human is what we call ourselves.”
“We can’t both be human.”
“No. It seems not.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“The Dark Cloud
Is the annoying piece of shit that wants to make you feel blue
Is the backstabbing ex that you foolishly believed wouldn’t cheat on you
Is the sadness of a set of animals that have to fly away, especially birds
Is the cutting vocabulary of nasty, vapid, evil, and stupid words”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“It's not about eliminating people. It's about moving people to their proper position in your life.”
― Alex R. Joie

“In a relationship people are either getting promoted or demoted,it's never personal... it's life and death.”
― Alex R. Joie

“Attraction is the minimum. I want a love where the only thing more contagious than our laughter is our zest for life.”
― Case Kenny, That's Bold of You: How To Thrive as Your Most Vibrant, Weird, and Real Self

“And we experience miracles so often, we just take them for granted. We abuse the magic of life every single day by the way we talk to each other, by the way we treat each other. We are much - there is something greater than us, and we are much greater than we think we are.”
― Jeymes Samuel

“And I get it, you know, from his perspective. Younger girls demand less--or at least, they demand different sorts of things. It's like how you might get a puppy, to keep an old dog young.

Gee, thanks, I said. That's hardly a flattering comparison, is it?

But what's in it of you?

He's steady, I said.

Steady is good.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I once asked my mother why she'd loved my father, and if she'd truly loved him, why she had left. He was my twin, she said. As if that were all the explanation needed to answer both questions.

Jude was not my twin. We were not two mirrors. We did not dress alike, could not be easily confused for brother and sister -- though we got looks sometimes, in restaurants. Waitresses trying to guess the dynamic. Father and daughter? Lovers? A student and professor with an inappropriate relationship?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“There was a kind of thrill or novelty for me at first in the difference between our ages. It was new, and I wanted to dwell in it, this way of living that might provoke curiosity or judgment from other people. With Jude, I was visible in a way I never had been before. I didn't feel shame around this but I sensed or feared that he did, and so I teased. Quick to make those jokes before anyone else could.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I felt like we'd promised to tell each other a secret and after I'd revealed mine, he'd changed his mind. Though maybe it was a female thing, I thought later, to feel vulnerability where a man might have felt power, but still I longed to see him cracked open under my hands in return, while I remained clothed and composed.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I don't need you to be here, Jude would tell me in time, but I want you to be. And that's how it should be. It's better that way. Love, he would tell me, is all about choice. Free will. Need is about dependency.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Waiting -- that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I'd known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then -- that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

Across from me at the table that afternoon, he shrugged.

So stay, he said, as if it were an easy thing.

I don't have any of my things.

I have things. A whole house full of things.

I shouldn't.

He was offering me what I'd wanted, but I was plagued by the feeling that the invitation wasn't genuine, that it was only because I'd prompted him that he suggested I'd stay. This cheapened it in my mind, and I felt graceless and worse than if he hadn't asked at all.

So don't. Forget it.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“But that night, listening to the swell music, Patsy Cline's voice strained with sorrow, I thought. She's got these little things, I've got you. Wrapping my arts around Jude's waist. In that moment, I felt so lucky I thought I might die. The only way I can understand this now is that what I was feeling, standing in his kitchen all those years ago, was a presentiment of loss.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Love a little, a lot. Love a lot, a little.”
― Jill Telford

“I loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved. Metaphors are lines, one of my professors had said in a lecture during my first year of university. How then, I might argue with her now, in the absence of figurative language, are we supposed to talk about love? Love, we say, and expect the word to hold so many things.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“And was Jude broken? How raw was the wound left by the last woman? What kind of woman would I have to be to keep him?

I could love her easily, abundantly, where with Jude I had to be so careful to parcel out my affections in case I scared him away.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I held out my hand and he looked down at it, as if he didn't understand what I was offering. At last he said, I think I'm a little old for that, love. But I stood there, stubborn, my empty palm open and outstretched. Don't give me that look, he said, and then he signed, relented. I felt happy then, proud, as if I had won something. Walking side by side with his hand in mine.

I would learn that things I perceived as abandonment were Jude's acts of trust, like the way he always walked ahead without looking behind him, trusting me to keep pace, to follow. But I was the kind who always looked back, glancing over my shoulder whenever I turned a corner, as if I were a woman descended from the line of Lot's wife in the old parable. When I licked my lips, I tasted salt.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“You're just different from the other boys I've brought home.

Different in what way?

Well, you're not exactly a boy.

I'm old, you mean?

No, not old. But you're, you know, a man.

I hate that there've been others, said Jude, and I was so surprised at the fact of his jealousy that I apologized. Why would he be jealous, I thought, when I had never loved or been loved this way before?

It wasn't like this, I said. It wasn't ever like this.

Tell me that you've never had anyone else. I want you to pretend.

Okay, I said, laughing. I've never been with anyone else. Happy?

Tell me I'm your first, he said, his voice low and his hands moving across my blouse. Tell me that you've never been touched.

I'm untouched. Chaste, a clean slate.

But you want it.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Tell me your greatest loves, the things you've loved the most, he said one afternoon.

That's easy, I said. My mother, my younger brother. And the ocean. Though does it count if what you love can't love you back?

Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it's never a great love. Can't be. It's one-sided. Except in the case of the ocean. For the ocean, we can make an exception.

How about you? I said. Big, real, soul-splitting loves. How many?

Real love? he said. Just the one time.

And I couldn't decide if that was better or worse than all the other loves I might have imagined for him.

How did you know? What made it so different from all the other times?

Oh, it's just one of those things. You know it when you see it.

Volatile, he called their love, but true.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I didn't know how to love like that, in bold gestures. My expressions were small: a folded love note buried in a jacket pocket, a drafted email addressed and sent to no one. Could a quiet love like mine be just as true?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt