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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5c679de | Gloaming," Dad said. "What?" "That word I couldn't remember. Gloaming. That short, murky time between half-light and dark." | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| ab6e740 | Gracie's father was an engineer, her mother an accountant. I couldn't picture either one of them yelling or throwing things or having affairs. I could see my dad doing stuff like that. Trish sure did. But Dad carried a war in his skull, and Trish was a drunk. Gracie's parents didn't have anything like that to deal with, but their daughter was falling apart on the bathroom floor. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| b5ee192 | The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat. I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up Me: "Let me tell you about it." | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 91fb1a8 | People were so fragile, so easily broken, so hard to put back together. "Mr." | Mary Downing Hahn | ||
| aa5246f | To everyone who enjoys ghost stories | Mary Downing Hahn | ||
| ddd8169 | Every person has a heart, but we're not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters. | love | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 9b58228 | Girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 55f5943 | The wind blows through him, cleansing. Salt and distance, smell of the deep. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 1785bb3 | You aren't some weak-willed wench. You can control your emotions. Remember all that you've survived. Behave like the queen you are. No one can take your dignity away from you. You lose it only by your own actions. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| b600f90 | The power of a man is like a bull's charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won't get you what you want." His words perplexed me. Wasn't power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.)" | women strength power | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 768d9c6 | Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 6acd669 | Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them. | fiction indian-american divakaruni immigrant-experience indian-authors women-s-fiction mothers-and-daughters novel | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| e536391 | Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we're willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 6a756ef | Love. There's no argument, no matter how strong, that can overcome that word. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| c6ff757 | The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But they keep sitting at the table, each thinking of the story differently, as teller and listener always must. In the mind of each, different images swirl up and fall away, and each holds on to a different part of the story, thinking it the most imp.. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 7e59dbe | The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1292a26 | What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more"... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more d.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 38b6315 | From the open French windows Sylvie watched Maurice erecting a makeshift tennis net, which mostly seemed to involve whacking everything in sight with a mallet. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 19d9de3 | There were other war veterans in the neighborhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders - Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 79d987b | Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1cb391c | Fox Corner - that's what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn't that be the point?' 'Really?' Hugh said doubtfully. 'It's a little whimsical, isn't it? It sounds like a children's story. .' 'A little whimsy never hurt anyone.' 'Strictly speaking, though,' Hugh said, 'can a house be a corner? Isn't it at one?' So this is marriage, Sylvie thought. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 25509d1 | Winter dark, five o'clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one ('Better than a French one', her mother had instructed), had been one of her parents' wedding presents. When the creditors came to call after the society portraitist's death his widow hid the clock beneath her skirts, bemoaning the passing of the crinoline. Lottie appeared to chime on the quarter, disconcerting th.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 77bda80 | I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 56a05b0 | Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion." | worship religion princess-diana | Kate Atkinson | |
| f60b71c | I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 5f59630 | Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while. | god | Kate Atkinson | |
| 7295071 | Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| b0fd80e | T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 93f8719 | the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 93a6607 | Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be. | violence | Kate Atkinson | |
| fa2dfa7 | Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea. | hope | Kate Atkinson | |
| bd67e06 | Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn't marry him, she thought. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 8e16d26 | We're gonna be ... I mean people like you and me ... we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists. | libertines | Armistead Maupin | |
| 89e96bb | numbed by disappointment and betrayal, like a child who had been awakened suddenly from a summer dream about christmas morning. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 2d0902c | Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave. She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave. "Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian." | Armistead Maupin | ||
| f3bd318 | if you're going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don't you think? | Armistead Maupin | ||
| c120fd5 | If I had my way...We would lock ourselves away from that madness out there... | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 4d99f53 | He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they're shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs -- not carving the correct tributary figurines pr.. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 4de50af | When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings and the long days with their spirits repl.. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| f54583d | But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| c7100a0 | The weak link-- she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at.. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 878829a | Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world | violence-in-society | Colson Whitehead | |
| 53c935d | In a situation of unequal power, a subordinate group has to focus on survival. It becomes very important for the subordinates to become highly attuned to the dominants as a way of protecting themselves from them. | Beverly Daniel Tatum | ||
| ad86eb5 | The 'Declaration of Independence' begins: 'All men are created equal'. What they really meant was 'All men are created equal - unless they happen to be Indian, black or female'!) | Terry Deary |