Alexandra Ripley Quotations

Books have become products, like cereal or perfume or deodorant.

I really don't know why Scarlett has such appeal. When I began writing the sequel, I had a lot of trouble because Scarlett is not my kind of person. She's virtually illiterate, has no taste, never learns from her mistakes.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command, or tends to; it melts them into color. Drawing, on the other hand, goes about resolving forms, giving edge and essence to things. To see shapes clearly, one outlines them--whether on paper or in the mind. Therefore, Michelangelo, a profoundly cultivated man, called drawing the basis of all knowledge whatsoever.

Personal answers to ultimate questions. That is what we seek.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge.

This moment, this being, is the thing. My life is all life in little. The moon, the planets, pass around my heart. The sun, now hidden by the round bulk of this earth, shines into me, and in me as well. The gods and the angels both good and bad are like the hairs of my own head, seemingly numberless, and growing from within. I people the cosmos from myself, it seems, yet what am I? A puff of dust, or a brief coughing spell, with emptiness and silence to follow.

I have but one life to give to adventure.

We're not home-and-hearth people. We're the adventurers, the buccaneers, the blockade runners. Without challenge, we're only alive.

To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It's the only thing that lasts, that's worth working for, for fighting for

If only' repeated again and again in her head like a battering ram...'if only' could break your heart.

You belong with me, Scarlett, haven't you figured that out? And the world is where we belong, all of it. We're not home-and-hearth people. We're the adventurers, the buccaneers, the blockade runners. Without challenge, we're only half alive. We can go anywhere, and as long as we're together, it will belong to us. But, my pet, we'll never belong to it. That's for other people, not for us.

One of the injustices of the world was that it was so easy to make the innocent and caring ones happy with so little.

And if things always stayed the same, Scarlett, what would be the reason for bothering to draw breath?

It's the centuries, Scarlett darling. All the life lived there, all the joy and all the sorrow, all the feasts and battles, they're in the air around and the land beneath you. It's time, years beyond our counting weighing without weight on the earth. You cannot see it or smell it or hear it or touch it, but you feel it brushing your skin and speaking without sound. Time. And mystery.

But you know who you are when you're on your own out there in all that emptiness. There's no past, no holding on to the scraps that are all you've got left. Everything is that minute, or maybe tomorrow, not yesterday.

Should-haves solve nothing. It's the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.

Should-haves solve nothing. It's the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.