Megan Abbott Quotes

I just don't like to lose what's in the window.

The idea of regretting not doing this seemed insane to me. Sitting in the corner at a bar at age 60, saying: 'I could've been Bond. Buy me a drink.' That's the saddest place I could be. At least now at 60 I can say: 'I was Bond. Now buy me a drink.'

What a pity so few

It's one thing to get beaten by a side who are a lot better than you, it's quite another to know you've thrown victory away in a game you should have won.

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu.

Imperfections define perfection

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They're pale, like a lioness's, nearly golden, but they also look like they've done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.

Finding beauty in the dissonance.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

I am inspired by so much. I am inspired by women, of course - beautiful women. I am also inspired by not so beautiful things in the world.

I've been lucky to have a beautiful wife and children. The idea that something so beautiful can be so horrific at the same time. Beauty is a complex thing.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall? When you realize, you just can't have it all.

If only…the saddest words in the English language.

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

Surely life has taught you that a thing can be both beautiful and vile.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

It was a shame, but as Ron said, you couldn't have everything in life.

Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands." "No he has kind of amazing hands.

It's the flaw that brings out the beauty.

Somehow, something is always suffering. Someone is always losing out somehow. If you pick one kid up, you're not picking the other one up. You just try to minimize those small let-downs because, in a way, life is a series of let-downs from everyone, all the time. We don't mean it, but it happens. So, I just try to minimize that and spread them wide.