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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9c164d3 | You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead. | dying gesture | Zadie Smith | |
| d359117 | Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d0221c0 | Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I'm glad I'm not the reader I was in college anymore, and I'll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader--the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate me.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8ebf033 | He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 1dbf8a3 | Between propriety and joy choose joy. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9352394 | There are two different kinds of glee club in this world. The first sing barbershop favourites and Gershwin tunes, they swing gently, moving from side to side and sometimes clicking their fingers and winking. Howard could basically deal with that type. He had got through those occasions graced by glee clubs of that type. But these boys were not of that type. Swaying and clicking and winking were just how they got warmed up. Tonight this gle.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| f3fb1c2 | Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8a4c0b8 | If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8a82eeb | For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 79c7e98 | She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook as intelligence might in fact be only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer th.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9ff8302 | He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turb.. | judgment prejudice | Zadie Smith | |
| 49d0095 | Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself. | daughters family generations life london love mothers mothers-and-daughters repel urgency | Zadie Smith | |
| cc2a7e6 | Ahhh, now, you see, we've been through this, and my thought is this: there's no smoke without fire," Archie would say, looking impressed by the wisdom of his own conclusion. "Know what I mean?" This was one of Archie's preferred analytic tools when confronted with news stories, historical events, and the tricky day-to-day process of separating fact from fiction. There's no smoke without fire. There was something so vulnerable in the way he .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a7cb0d5 | In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2faeafd | That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way. | rare | Zadie Smith | |
| 5e07fa7 | She holds and I do not break away, and that is something after all. We lie there, tethered to each other by the fragile promise of our fingers while the night grows bolder. Unafraid, it opens its mouth and swallows us whole. | Libba Bray | ||
| 8e71bb7 | Blood is thicker than water. That's what they say. But in truth, most things are. | Libba Bray | ||
| 27c7fdf | It keeps her purity vacum-sealed to preserve its freshness for her future husband. | Libba Bray | ||
| 559cc90 | What Evie needed was a little hair of the dog, but her parents had confiscated her hip flask. It was a swell flask, too--silver, with the initials of Charles Warren etched into it. Good old Charlie, the dear. She'd promised to be his girl. That lasted a week. Charlie was a darling, but also a thudding bore. His idea of petting was to place a hand stiffly on a girl's chest like a starched doily on some maiden aunt's side table while pecking,.. | Libba Bray | ||
| b94a070 | It is the taste of forgetting. Of sleep and dreams with no waking. Never to long or yearn, to struggle or hurt or love or desire ever again. And I understand that this is what it truly means to lose your soul. | Libba Bray | ||
| fac52f9 | Only ninnies go to Penny's. | Libba Bray | ||
| 1335fd8 | Ain't that the way of the world, now? Good luck turns bad. Bad luck turns good. Just a big rolling craps game played between this world and the next, and we the dice getting tossed around. | Libba Bray | ||
| c3ab6c1 | Will this be my life forevermore? Careful tea parties and the quiet fear that I don't belong, that I'm a fraud? I held magic in my hands! I tasted freedom in a land where summer doesn't end. I outsmarted the Rakshana with a boy whose kiss I still feel somehow. was it all for naught? I'd rather not have known any of it than have it snatched away after a taste. | Libba Bray | ||
| 593a538 | Do not be tempted by English roses. Their beauty fades, but their thorns are forever. | Libba Bray | ||
| e6ab4a2 | Our days are numbered in the book of days, Most High," Gorgon murmurs as the garden comes once more into view. "That is what gives them sweetness and purpose." | life purpose | Libba Bray | |
| 1d3ddd8 | These words have been sanitized for your protection. An adjective and a noun, respectively. | Libba Bray | ||
| edd11af | No, you're right. I shan't ever understand your willingness to lie down and die," Felicity barks. "If you won't at least try to fight, I have no sympathy for you." | Libba Bray | ||
| 1d3c23b | Why had this power come to me? I can scarcely govern myself. At times, I feel as if I could dance through the halls with happiness, and then, just as suddenly, my thoughts are dark and lost and frightening. | Libba Bray | ||
| da095be | Are you saying we're not ravish-worthy? | Libba Bray | ||
| 33297c5 | She wears her grief like a coat of feathers too heavy for flight. He crossed out heavy, wrote weighted instead, then decided that was downright pretentious and put heavy back in. | Libba Bray | ||
| 2046f3c | I don't want to have this conversation. It's sunny out. There's bacon downstairs. | Libba Bray | ||
| d1677f6 | Why do I feel this response makes Kartik much like governesses who tell their charges grisly fairy tales before bed and then expect them to sleep peacefully through the night? | Libba Bray | ||
| 5e175c6 | I've the run of the place, and so i spend some time exploring, climbing steep stairs into thin turrets whose windows give me a bird's-eye view of the land surrounding Spence. I flit past locked doors and dark, paneled rooms that seem more like museum exhibits than living, breathing places. I wander until it is dark and past the time when I should be in bed, not that I think anyone shall be searching for me. | Libba Bray | ||
| a020ccf | Yes, fine," I say, feeling dead inside. They don't know what they're in for at Spence, getting me, a ghost of a girl who'll nod and smile and take her tea who isn't really here." | Libba Bray | ||
| 79240d8 | But forgiveness...I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. | Libba Bray | ||
| 4aeb580 | Alliteration. It's when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase," Memphis explained. "Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty." | sam-lloyd | Libba Bray | |
| 3e60aed | It's over, her mind whispered. There's still hope, her heart insisted. | love | Libba Bray | |
| 3de85e7 | I feel a tug in the air. The magic. When I look over, Felicity has her eyes closed in concentration, and a faint smile curves those full lips. Suddenly, Lady Denby breaks wind with an enormous crackling sound. There is no hiding the shock and horror on her face as she realizes what she's done. She breaks wind again, and several women clear their throats and look away as if they can pretend no to notice the offense. | Libba Bray | ||
| 77dca44 | We'll have to make the chumps believe it. Moonlight strolls. Staring into each other's eyes. Sharing the same straw in our egg cream. Dreadful pet names." "Not Lamb Chop," Evie protested. "That's hideous." "You got it, Pork Chop." "I will murder you in your sleep." Sam grinned. "Does that mean you're sleeping beside me?" "Not on your life, Lloyd." | Libba Bray | ||
| 6e8e40e | You see, the glamour girl standing before you was not the dame I first laid eyes on in Penn Station. In fact, at first I thought she was the charwoman. Don't you remember how frightful you looked that night, Honey Pie?" Sam patted Evie's hand. Her strained smile pleased him. "She was sooty and grimy. Had on her mother's dress and those thick woolen stockings that grandmas and war orphans wear. And one of her teeth was missing. Ghastly. But .. | Libba Bray | ||
| 420ba2f | Unspeakable nightmares surround the men now. They would scream if they could. It's no use. The dream has them, and it will not relinquish its hold. Ever. Back in their beds on Mott Street. the men's bodies go limp. But behind their closed lids, their eyes move frantically as, one by one, they are pulled deeper and deeper into a nightmare from which they will never, ever wake. | Libba Bray | ||
| 89696ac | I can't help feeling humiliated for Ithal. He stands at the wall and watches us go, and when we reach the turnoff for the school, he's still there with the mangled flower in his hands, far behind us a small, dying star fading out of our constellation. | Libba Bray | ||
| 4643f11 | The ability to have a friend, and to be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard-work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards. | Ann Patchett | ||
| f938319 | It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we mght have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how. | Ann Patchett |