steamy victorians

Interviewer: "Put a handsome bloke in a period costume and his popularity rating goes off the scale. What's that about?"

Suppression. Not being able to touch someone, or say what you feel, because it's inappropriate. That tightens the sexual tension. You want to metaphorically rip off the corset! We don't think twice about such stuff nowadays. Anything goes in our society.
--Richard Armitage, North and South hottie

chef's special

"Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have ... there are two kinds of people in this world: those who do what they say they're going to do -- and everyone else."
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"Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious, and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying his company, working with him or finding him entertaining. This business grows assholes: it's our principal export. I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole, too."
--Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

another thousand days

"Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations -- along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit -- are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you've been very hungry, to sleep when you've been awake too long? And if it is, shouldn't we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers."
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"Did you know it's defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself -- if he loses these, he loses his voice."
--Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Tuscany

literary decor

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
--Anna Quindlen

the accidential venetian

"In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. 'Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?' We look across at other people's piles and measure them, shouting, 'My pain is bigger than your pain.' It's all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power."
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"Whether we call it controlling or enabling or the more poetic 'taming,' power issues don't rear up as frenzied in a marriage between older people, the riper souls understanding these maneuvers to be ruinous. Older people get married for different reasons than younger people do. Perhaps it's that in a younger partnership, the man lives on his side of the marriage and the woman on hers. Gracious opponents in competitions over career, social and economic status, frequency and intensity of applause, they meet at table or in bed, each exhausted from the solitary race. In a later marriage, even if they work on different things, they're still working as a team, remembering that being together was why they got married in the first place. I look at Fernando, and I can't imagine not remembering that."
--Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

master is slave

"Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master."
--Edward P. Jones, The Known World