Nancy Horan Quotes

“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.”

— Nancy Horan

“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.”

— Nancy Horan

“In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.”

— Nancy Horan

“It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.”

— Nancy Horan

“Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.”

— Nancy Horan

“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”

— Nancy Horan

“I'm like the trunk of a cactus, I suppose." she told him. "I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again.”

— Nancy Horan

“As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.”

— Nancy Horan

“It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”

— Nancy Horan

“Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”

— Nancy Horan

“There's a phrase over the door; she called to him. "Haec est porta coeli." ... "Here is the gate to heaven.”

— Nancy Horan

“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.”

— Nancy Horan

But when you have a gift, it isn't yours to keep to yourself. It's the reason you're here. It's your purpose.

— Nancy Horan

“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.”

— Nancy Horan

“[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky
'the hem of heaven.”

— Nancy Horan

“She had found more than peace of mind. She had discovered the state of her soul set down in ink.”

— Nancy Horan

To fare on - fusing the self that wakes and the self that dreams.

— Nancy Horan

Did all women married to well-known men struggle for recognition?

— Nancy Horan

You simply have to move forward despite all the notions about how we are supposed to be.

— Nancy Horan

“Take my love for granted," he said, "and I shall do the same for you.”

— Nancy Horan

“I don't buy junk. When I buy something, it's got to be perfection or I don't want it. You won't find me coming home with five cheap suits, one for each day of the week. I'd rather have one perfect suit or none.”

— Nancy Horan

“What did a person need to survive? Food. Water. Shelter. Warmth in cold weather. And something else ... books.”

— Nancy Horan

“We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”

— Nancy Horan

“But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was.”

— Nancy Horan

“When both lovers yearn to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection, this is the highest form of love possible between a man and a woman ... To experience such love is to feel oneself doubled. Such feeling liberates and deepens the personality, inspires us to noble deeds and works of genius.”

— Nancy Horan

“What a morning," Louis would say as they walked the rocky, dry hills above their rented chateau just outside Marseilles. "I want to take this day, fold it up, and put it in my pocket so I can have it again and again.”

— Nancy Horan

“If Catherine would just let go' had been their mantra for so long. Now Mamah understood Catherine's dilemma better. She wouldn't divorce Frank because she feared he wouldn't pay her child support and alimony. And there was revenge to be sure: By refusing to divorce after twenty years of accommodating him, Catherine was squeezing recompense from Frank for a longstanding emotional debt. But that was only part of it. Catherine held on because she still loved him, and remembered what it was like to be loved by him. Nothing else in the world compared to the incandescent joy Frank brought to his best beloved.”

— Nancy Horan

It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn't look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.

— Nancy Horan

“To quicken with life. After an hour, covered”

— Nancy Horan

“A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.”

— Nancy Horan

The idea of America, where emigrants could meld with others in the great classless pot called the United States. Did it work, really?

— Nancy Horan

“The Story of a Lie. ...”

— Nancy Horan

“My mother is my father's wife. And the children of lovers are orphans.”

— Nancy Horan

Fanny believed their emotional landscapes were similar: Both were tenderhearted, headstrong, tough and vulnerable all at once.

— Nancy Horan

“It was the sunny way he could tease her out of a snit, the way he looked at her so hungrily.”

— Nancy Horan

He loved his wife, though love seemed an inadequate word to contain all the emotion that passed between married people.

— Nancy Horan

“Maybe he knew that life is not an even fight," Louis mused. "Given the odds, it's the stand one takes that matters.”

— Nancy Horan

“Mamah saw clearly now just what she had lost. She had given up her right to keep her place as the children's most beloved. The small, daily offices of love that had connected her to the children before-the shoe tying, the hair combing, the nightly storytelling-were no longer hers to claim. How dare she seek from them the comfort that had once so nourished her? To keep them yearning for a mother who was rarely with them, through her own choice, would be to sentence them to whole lifetimes of sorrow.”

— Nancy Horan

“Stay the course, daughter. But show yourself some kindness along the way.”

— Nancy Horan

Together greet life's solemn real, Together own one glad ideal, Together laugh, together ache, And think one thought-"Each other's sake," And hope one hope-in new-world weather, To still go on, and go together.

— Nancy Horan

“That kind of work ultimately didn't satisfy her deeper creative impulses, and it didn't fetch any glory in Louis's circle.”

— Nancy Horan

How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

— Nancy Horan

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.

— Nancy Horan

“'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.”

— Nancy Horan

I always use primary sources, in addition to reading biographies and other materials.

— Nancy Horan

“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.”

— Nancy Horan

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.

— Nancy Horan

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

— Nancy Horan

“If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.”

— Nancy Horan

“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.”

— Nancy Horan