Jean Stafford Quotes

To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience.

I read Wolfe’s new book _ The Story of a Novel_ and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard.

It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.

He whirled round and round in his rapid love; it pricked him on the breastbone like a needle. He wanted to be shut up in a small space to think about it. He wanted to grab it and eat it like an apple so that nobody else could have it.

She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar and to console one another in the most maudlin fashion over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey, to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, they were no longer alone.

I fell in love with Caligula and now I'm married to Calvin.

Would you like me to write Mrs. Ames about inviting you to Yaddo? Get Miss Moore to write too. You can’t invite yourself, though, of course, almost all the invitations are planned. It would be marvelous to have you there. I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn’t drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized. At last my divorce [from Jean Stafford] is over. It’s funny at my age to have one’s life so much in and on one’s hands. All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing—I suppose that’s what vocation means—at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say.

I just want to hear you laugh. I don’t care about perfect pitch. I just want to see you smile. I don’t care about golden trophies that shine. I just want to give you a soft place to land. I don’t care about what place you come in. I just want you to be comfortable in your skin. I don’t care about the blemish on your nose or the size of your jeans. I just want to love you today, as you are. I don’t care about what the world expects you to be.

Champagne Sheets by Stewart Stafford The little girl who swam with sharks, Receiver clutched in her dead hand, A naked, lonely death in a sterile room, Pill bottles silent witnesses to her end. Did she jump, or did others push her? Tabloid gossip for the masses to echo, Livid without make-up in the mortuary, Stripped of her last vestiges of privacy. Her disturbed mother was never there, She had no siblings or a nurturing father, True love and children evaded her grasp, A fragile shell, now a luminary immortal. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

She had expected rich chandeliers, not these morose and fungoid lamps, and the carpet was not dense and darkly red, but was thin, and it bore upon its lugubrious puce background a vapid pattern of flaxen parallelograms.

A cat is a peerless poultice.

If she ever got fat, she thought, or if she ever said anything fat, she would lock herself in a bathroom and stay there until she died," thinks the young protagonist Molly Fawcett. "Often she thought how comfortably you could live in a bathroom. You could put a piece of beaver board on top of the tub and use it as a bed. In the daytime, you could have a cretonne spread on it so that it would look like a divan. You could use the you-know-what as a chair and the lavatory as a table. You wouldn't have to have anything else but some canned corn and marshmallows. . . .

Once out in the bright green meadows of the valley he thought he would be safe from the thoughts that swarmed about him like a dream of reptiles.