A Wright Perspective: An evening with Nancy Horan

"Tell her happiness is just practice. If she acted happy, she would be happy." - Edwin

“The human race will evolve to a higher plane where there won’t be a need for laws regulating marriage and divorce.” - Mamah

"What about duty? What about honor?" - Mattie

"You can't keep your children by having no life of your own. They will know.

Your own unhappiness will plant the seeds of unhappiness in your children…

And they will blame you for it someday." - Frank

"I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing and was a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace," Wright once said.

“She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn’t sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it’s sacred and has its own rights.” - Mamah

"Frank made me remember who I was before." -Mamah

"The horizontal line is the line of domesticity, of course." - Frank

“So if we can just hang on for a millennium or two, it’ll all work out.” - Frank

“It has been my belief and expressed philosophy that the

very legitimate right of a free love can never be acceptable if it is enjoyed

at the expense of maternal love,” Ellen Kay

"A marriage consummated without mutual love, or continued without mutual love, does not elevate the personal

dignity of man or woman. It is instead a criminal

counterfeiting of the highest values of life."

-Ellen Kay

"He finds out who you are, the way any good architect does. Your habits and your tastes. He takes you on, and then he teaches you. It's a process. Pretty soon you start to see the world through new eyes." - Mamah to her friend, Mattie

The ‘freedom’ in which we joined was infinitely more difficult than any conformity with customs could have been. Few will ever venture it. ... Your wives with your certificates for loving — pray that you may love as much or be loved as well!” - Frank

"I want you, Mame. Next to me. I want to go out into the world and look

at things with clear eyes, the way I did when I was twenty.

I feel as if I've hardly lived. I need time away from here - a spiritual adventure - " - Frank

"In the new morality, everything exchanged between husband and wife will be a free gift of love, never demanded by one or the other as right. Such demands are merely a crude survival of the lower periods of culture. " -Ellen Kay

"Love is moral, even without legal marriage." -Ellen Kay

"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. When this great love happens – and it is but once in a lifetime – it has a higher right thank all other feelings. The perfect love establishes its own right in a

life." -Ellen Kay

Haec est porta coeli - Here is the door to heaven

"It's time, Mamah. It will be the most beautiful place

you've ever lived. You won't care if you can't go out and see a play."

- Frank

"Last Sunday our preacher warned about consorting with people who live in sin. He didn't name no names, but..."

"Not a man here wants to be spending his holiday this way, Mr. Wright. Personally, you have our respect and

sympathy. But the fact is, the editors think the only way to sell papers is with

sensational news stories. That's what the people want."

"One more new wrinkle to adapt to, but no worth trying to change.

I might as well try to alter his eye color or reshape his nose." Mamah

Her father had been a great admirer of the men who worked the sleeping cars. Julian's formality suddenly seemed familiar and endearing. His bearing was dignified, respectful, but not fawning.

John's voice came through the darkness. "Don't you ever get homesick for Oak Park?""There isn't a day goes by that I don't miss you. And some days...well, I just wish for things that can't be right now. But I carry both of you around in my heart all the time. It's funny - it's as if I have a little room inside whereI can go, and there you are. And that makes me calm as can be."

Frank is relieved to have the previous half-finished painting covered over.

It had driven him crazy, its Greek-robed figures entirely out of sympathy with the rest of the

Gardens, its scale absurdly grand. He has designed the new mural to be circles intersecting circles, like bubbles or balloons

floating up into the air. Light. Airy.

Abstract. Festive.

"Pine," Frank says. "Clean white pine."

Nature!We are encompassed and enveloped by her,

powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her dance and sweeps us along, until

exhausted we fall from her arms.

She has placed me here; she will lead me hence - I confide myself to her.

She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her work.

I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false, she herself has spoken all.

All the fault is hers; hers is all the glory. -Goethe

"Are you up to building another Taliesin?" Frank asks.

Billy straightens his back and lifts his chin.

"A man's got to work."

Merinda Kaye Hensley, University of Illinois Library