I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep yearning for a person and a place, highlighting the emotional connection one can have with love and memories.
This quote reflects the nostalgia and longing for a past love and the experiences tied to it. The speaker conveys a sense of unfulfilled desire, where the memories of sensory experiences are intertwined with emotions of lost affection. The compass imagery indicates that no matter the distance, their heart remains oriented towards that special person and place, underscoring the inescapable pull of love.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the power of memories and how they shape our present feelings.
How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.
We were born with a natural tendency to focus on love. Our imaginations were creative and flourishing, and we knew how to use them. We were connected to a richer world, a world full of enchantment and a sense of the miraculous. What happened?
At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship.
I want to fall in love with something in the way I fell in love with the idea of Harry before I write anything else.
When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me and a trembling seizes me all over.
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