Glorious Friday Quotes

No words for the passion. No words for the need. No words for the sheer epiphany of the moment. And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington. And it was glorious.

It was a Wednesday, I think. Yes, a Wednesday, that miserable day sandwiched between the dreadful Monday and Tuesday and the 'all right' Thursday and Friday, which ultimately gave way to what I hoped woud be a glorious weekend.

Faith isn’t just Good Friday and Easter Sunday; faith is awkward Saturday too. So much is sitting in that tomb with the soon-to-be resurrected Lord. It’s so dark. So damp. So scary. The silence is deafening. But there is hope in there.

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else.

Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.

Many of us, the children of middle-class Manila, were fed on Catholic guilt and raised under the bright sun of the American dream. We went to church. We went to school. We recited the rosary every night and ate no meat on Good Friday. We hung tinsel on plastic Christmas trees, studied John Steinbeck, memorized the beatitudes, and measured our skirts a polite three inches below the knees. Money was tight, but there were books. When my mother’s girlhood collection ran out, she sent me to my grandfather and his numbered bookshelves. I lived for most of my adolescence on rafts floating down the Mississippi, inside little houses on prairies, and around wood fires in the New England and Chicago and London of my imagination. I was Meg Murry. I was Jo March. I was Scout and Mowgli and Anne Shirley and Lyra Silvertongue and for one glorious summer Sherlock Holmes, with my father playing my indulgent Watson. My

Good Friday is a holiday, and nothing else, for the majority: it is the day on which there is more drunkenness than on any other day in the year. An English fair is one of the most glorious things in the world, even on Hampstead Heath, with its jingling round-abouts, striped booths, coconut shies, gypsy fortune-tellers, and its riot of friendliness. But the fair on Hampstead Heath on Good Friday makes Hampstead Heath Calvary, a Calvary where Christ is mocked while He dies. But His own excuse for poor human nature is true indeed: “they know not.

And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington. And it was glorious.

For her, their romantic interlude atop the staircase had been a glorious, magical, enlightening introduction to pleasure. For him,it had merely been Friday evening.