Intermission Quotes

“Intermission. Mare Internum.We will have a brief pause now. If this novel were a theater, you could go out into the lobby, wait in line for a drink, or for the bathroom. Give people a chance to admire your clothes, hair, or jewels. Step outside for some air or a smoke. Backstage the crew would be busy transforming the scenery, actors would change their costumes and redo their makeup, Some would be done until final curtain, others awaiting their first entrance.But we're not in the theater, and I am not letting you go outside this story, not really. Where we are is more like a pause between breaths. Whether you're inhaling or exhaling, there's a pause just before, like the pause you can feel more than hear before the tide reverses. Where we are is the point of intersection in the figure eight. Turned on its side the eight becomes the symbol of infinity. You can make this figure with your hips when you dance. Over and over you will return to that moment of balance before your weight shifts from one hip to the other. The balance of this story is about to shift. The scenery is changing, as we make our slow way across Mare Internum. A journey I am not going to describe. When the story begins again, some of the people you have come to know and love, or not, Dido, Bertha, Paulina, Reginus, and Joseph will appear less frequently...I don't like it when characters fade form the story, so I am apologizing in advance, but life is like that. We leave people and places and times behind. We encounter new ones. Sometimes we can't see the patterns or connections, but they are there, between one breath and the next. In the ebb and flow of tides. In the rhythm of the dance.”

“Some relationships need an intermission while some require an ending.”

“Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.”

“Work like it is your passion, vision, and mission. Love like you are drunk with love without intermission.”

“I tap my pen against the Edith Piaf record, thinking of how to express my future sentiments when my journey comes to an end. Either in the arms of the girl I love, or buried in a box of memories, this note will be the last.'Ma femme, Je ne regrette rien, because I found everything. I love you.”

“The hooting of the owl with its tender wing is more familiar to me than the crowing of the cock. I prefer the strings to the woodwinds. Intermission: that is the darkness. The light feels like a vague scratching”

“I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.”

“Acting is such a desperately futile profession anyway. Playing out the lives of other men. Knowing of their failures and successes long before they ever do. Living, suffering, murdering, dying … all in the space of three hours. Sometimes only two. And in such a confined little area. And over and over again every night. Can you imagine anything more perfectly stupid? Squeezing a whole existence into a measly evening’s entertainment on the stage? And not only that – in the middle of it all – pausing for an intermission. It makes one’s own life seem unbearably preposterous, doesn’t it?”

“While Nape was making the bread and Dryas boiling the ram, Daphnis and Chloe had time to go forth as far as the ivy-bush; and when he had set his snares again and pricked his lime-twigs, they not only catched good store of birds, but had a sweet collation of kisses without intermission, and a dear conversation in the language of love: "Chloe, I came for thy sake." "I know it, Daphnis." "'Tis long of thee that I destroy the poor birds." "What wilt thou with me?" "Remember me." "I remember thee, by the Nymphs by whom heretofore I have sworn in yonder cave, whither we will go as soon as ever the snow melts." "But it lies very deep, Chloe, and I fear I shall melt before the snow." "Courage, man; the Sun burns hot." "I would it burnt like that fire which now burns my very heart." "You do but gibe and cozen me!" "I do not, by the goats by which thou didst once bid me to swear to thee.”