Nancy Horan Quotes
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'Loving Frank' is about a forbidden love affair between two people who lived a hundred years ago - Frank Lloyd Wright and his married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The affair set off a colossal newspaper scandal when the lovers ran off to Europe together.
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So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.
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I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.
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If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.
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I'm married to Kevin, a photographer whose career has put him on the campaign trail with presidential candidates and sent him on assignment to far-flung places for long periods of time. It was sometimes rough when our children were small, and I was beginning to write in earnest.
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I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.
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One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.
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History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.
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It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.
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Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.
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I'm like the trunk of a cactus... I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for awhile until I get thirsty again.
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How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.
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I love you so much. I love you enough that I want to stay separate from you. You're an extraordinary man, Frank Wright. I could so easily lose myself in your world and never make a world of my own. And where would that leave us? We'd both be bored stupid.
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It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.
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What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else... books.
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I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. -Loving Frank
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In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.
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It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.