Elizabeth Enright Quotes
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Garnet woke up early. Before she was quite wide awake she lay with her eyes closed, half afraid to look for fear it might be raining. But even with them closed she knew it was going to be all right because the color behind her lids was clear and rosy and she knew the sunlight lay upon them. And she heard crickets in the meadow, and a fly buzzing against the screen, and somebody whistling outside. So it was all right and she opened her eyes. Oh what a day! She held up her arm in the sunlight; all the little hairs on it glittered like fine gold, and her closed fingers were ember-colored as if there were a light inside them.
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By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.
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All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants--and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.
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Like ghosts the children walked across the lawn on their bare feet. The moon was full. Above the damp grass hung a veil of mist, luminous with moonlight and spangled with fireflies. There was no wind, and the sound of the brook was very distinct, tinkling, splashing, running softly. It made Mona think of an ancient fountain, shaped like a shell, covered with moss, and set in a secluded garden. Something she half remembered, or imagined.
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A certain red cardinal sounded like a little bottle being filled up, up, up with some clear liquid.
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The mullein had finished blooming, and stood up out of the pastures like dusty candelabra. The flowers of Queen Anne's lace had curled up into birds' nests, and the bee balm was covered with little crown-shaped pods. In another month -- no, two, maybe -- would come the season of the skeletons, when all that was left of the weeds was their brittle architecture. But the time was not yet. The air was warm and bright, the grass was green, and the leaves, and the lazy monarch butterflies were everywhere.
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I loved the flash of jewels and the luster of satin. In those days women dressed.
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The second exploded like a bomb, all by itself.
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Never plan a picnic' Father said. 'Plan a dinner, yes, or a house, or a budget, or an appointment with the dentist, but never, never plan a picnic.
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The Carthage traffic cop has an alligator in his bathtub!
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Someday she planned to paint he ceiling: Blue, with gold stars on it, whole constellations, and a section of the Milky Way.
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Summer was over in twenty minutes that day. Finished. At four o'clock in the afternoon the roses were quiet on their stems, full-blown, fulfilled; the water in the pool was warm; the leaves on the trees quiet, too, and green. The cat lay with his belly to the sun, steeped in heat.
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Each golden day was cherished to the full, for one had the feeling that each must be the last. Tomorrow it would be winter.
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Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.
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The summer,' Randy explained. 'I'm going to appreciate it. I'm going to walk in the woods noticing everything, and ride my bike on all the roads I never explored. I'm going to fill a pillow with ladies' tobacco so I can smell it in January and remember about August. I'm going to dry a big bunch of pennyroyal so I can break pieces off all winter and think of summer. I'm going to look at everything, and smell everything, and listen to everything so I'll never forget.
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Each day the sun shone, the birds lingered, though the trees were turning, purely out of habit, and their rose and yellow and rust looked strange and beautiful above the brilliant green grass.
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This was the hour she loved; this lonely hour when the others were distant in sleep and she was alone in the house; when she could cry if she wanted to, or curse, or sit at her work and think or remember and no longer be anything but herself. There is a latitude to late night, when one's thoughts dare to travel, and the emotions are free, no longer frightened by confinement.
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Already he knew that to overdo a thing is to destroy it.
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Maybe we benefit from the providence of others more often than we know.
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October sunshine bathed the park with such a melting light that it had the dimmed impressive look of a landscape by an old master.
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No matter how old a person gets, he's never old in spring!
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In the deep sky where there had been a sun, we saw a ring of white silver; a smoking ring, and all the smokes were silver, too; gauzy, fuming, curling, unbelievable. And who had ever seen the sky this color! Not in the earliest morning or at twilight, never before had we seen or dreamed this strange immortal blue in which a few large stars now sparkled as though for the first time in creation.