Diverse Characters Quotes

I don’t check any particular box. I’ve never caught feelings for anyone because they were a male or a female. I feel for people because of who they are. Not what they are.

So, first, I want you to know that everybody experiences some level of anxiety. It's a normal human response to stress. It's like your body's smoke alarm. If there's a fire, you want to know so you can put it out or call 9-1-1, right?”I shrug. “I guess. But it feels like my alarm is going off all the time.”Doctor Ann nods. “Some people's systems are more sensitive than others'. For you, maybe all it takes is burning a piece of toast, and your alarm thinks the house is on fire.

If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy’s interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life’s meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Once you break someone’s heart, you are forever its master.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Perhaps all love stories no matter how varied are essentially the same.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.