#nineteen

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33) ↗

— Tim Willocks

#apple #asymmetry #atlantic #autumn #blind-man

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#life #nineteen #road #years #death

During the night he'd kicked off a sock; his toes were plump as early peas; it was all she could do not to taste his caramel skin. So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him,you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#nineteen-minutes #selena #love

I was all alone, you were all I had. Love you, you were all mine. Love me, I was yours right. I was yours right. ↗

— Tegan Quin

#sara-quin #tegan-and-sara #tegan-quin #the-con #love

When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone. ↗

— Mary Balogh

#nineteen #love

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#because #fellow #find #involved #just

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year. ↗

— Georg Brandes

#approached #did #find #i #inspiration

The hope of the nation which throughout the nineteenth century had not for a moment reconciled itself with the loss of independence, and fighting for its own freedom, fought at the same time for the freedom of other nations. ↗

— Lech Walesa

#fighting #fought #freedom #had #hope

I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture. ↗

— Gyorgy Legeti

#already #beginning #come #culture #force

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century. ↗

— John McGahern

#almost #century #ireland #nineteenth #nineteenth century