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“Yes. Kissing. Overrated."

"I could change your mind," Zach said, surprising the hell out of them both. Why would he take something as simple as this banter as a challenge? "I don't know that I want to, but I feel right sure I could."

"How arrogant. How typically male."

"I suppose." He shrugged and reached for the wine bottle. "More?"

She nodded, frowning now. "How do you know you could change my mind? It's been a long time since you... well�"

"Over two years." The pain was there, an ache in his chest he imagined he would feel every time he thought of Hannah.

And he thought of her every day. Dreamed of her about as often. But lately, maybe only in the past week, he'd begun to realize that his life had not ended with his wife's.

He either had to die or start living again.”
― Tracy Sumner, Tides of Passion

“Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.”
― Barbara Davis

“While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“When we finally let go... that's when the real fun begins."

The Second Most Exotic Marigold Hotel”
― Cheryll Snow

“Stupid things have good outcomes all the time.”
― JJ Maybank

“I can't let you take the blame for something I did. You have too much to lose.”
― JJ Maybank

“Even a blind pig can find an acorn at times! I actually don't know what that saying means, but I saw it on Reddit.”
― JJ Maybank

“The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn’t a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The Outer Banks, paradise on Earth. It’s the sort of place where you either have two jobs or two houses. Two tribes, one island.”
― John B. Routledge

“The North Star. It’s the only star that doesn’t move. Everything else spins around that.”
― Sarah Cameron

“There are only three kinds of relationships in the animal kingdom. The first is commensalism. One example: Fish finding hiding spots in coral reefs. Fish profit, but life for the coral doesn’t change. Then there’s mutualism, a relationship where both animals benefit from each other. The tricky thing about animals is you don’t always know what kind of relationship you’re in. Which brings me to relationship number three. The parasitic.”
― John B. Routledge

“It is not so difficult to be oneself.
It is not so difficult to walk in someone else's shoes. The truly difficult thing is to approach all people and cultures as an alien from another planet would and judge them equally - without empathy.”
― Rodney Barfield, Seasoned by Salt: A Historical Album of the Outer Banks