Bernadette Peters Quotes

You've got to be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

He showed it to me and Lesley—it was handwritten and in Latin. Nightingale translated. “‘The Lord and Lady of the River do give you notice that they will be holding their Spring Court together at the Garden of Bernadette of Spain,’” he paused and reread the last bit. “‘Bernie Spain’s Garden and that you are hereby charged as if by ancient custom to secure and police the fair against all enemies.’ And it’s sealed with the Hanged Man of Tyburn and the Waterwheel of Oxley plus signatures.” He showed us the seals. “Somebody’s been watching way too much Game of Thrones,” said Lesley.