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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3edf89d | The lake's deep...and dark...and dangerous. | ghost-story lake scary | Mary Downing Hahn | |
| c806487 | As Corey and I followed Grandmother out of the library, we glanced at each other. Without saying a word, I knew my sister was thinking exactly what I was thinking. Rappings and tappings, footsteps, doors opening and shutting-- could do that. And more. Bringing ghosts back to Fox Hill would be like playing haunted house all summer long. | Mary Downing Hahn | ||
| 9e0ff29 | Where did you come up with that granny story?" "I saw it on a TV show about ghosts. The Jenningses really ate it up, didn't they?" "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Corey grinned. "Ghosts are about to reappear at the inn," she said. "In fact, I predict the Jenningses will have their own experience with the supernatural before they leave." "They'll go home and tell other people," I said, "who'll come to the inn hoping to see ghosts. They.. | Mary Downing Hahn | ||
| 9630035 | Sissy tilted her chair back so far I was sure she'd fall on her head any second. Not that I cared. Maybe she'd leave if she hurt herself. | Mary Downing Hahn | ||
| 3575a3a | All the way back, I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn't mean giving in. It didn't mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| bc99bb1 | Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us. | danger dread | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 133ad1c | A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day! | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| dd0c8fd | Were the stories we told each other true? Who knows? At the best of times, a story is a slippery thing. Perhaps that was why it changed with each telling. Or is that the nature of all stories, the reason for their power? | mythology story storytelling | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 083e797 | Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 1a5f4c1 | What is the nature of life? Life is lines of dominoes falling. One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever. | divakaruni fiction immigrant-fiction indian-american love mothers-and-daughters novel relationships women-s-books | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | |
| 1158f01 | Can our actions change our destiny? Or are they like sand piled against the breakage in a dam, merely delaying the inevitable? | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 994e08e | Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d0da6c6 | How pride had kept them from admitting their mistakes--and | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 623feff | Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 6f45d91 | When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d05a111 | In the things we love lie clues to who we are. What we want for those we love. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 2c3fcfe | The fates are cruel," Bheeshma whispered, "and they've been crueler than usual to you. But the sins you committed in ignorance are not your fault." "I'll still have to pay for them," Karna said. "Isn't that how karma works? Look at what happened to Pandu, who killed a sage by accident, thinking him to be a wild deer. He had to bear the consequences of it for the rest of his life." -- | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| da54ccf | And finally, I bless my daughters, who are yet unborn. I pray that, if life tests them--as sooner or later life is bound to do--they'll be able to stand steadfast and think carefully, using their hearts as well as their heads, understanding when they need to compromise, and knowing when they must not. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 90f9b62 | The choice they made in the moment of my need changed something in our relationship. I no longer depended on them so completely in the future. And when I took care to guard myself from hurt, it was as much from them as from our enemies. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 3d126c7 | How innocent we'd been, thinking that if only we willed something hard enough, it would come true. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 00fb6fe | Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you. No matter how famous or powerful they became, my husbands would always long to be cherished. They would always yearn to feel worthy. If a person could make them feel that way, they'd bind themselves to him--or her--forever. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 025b42a | She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman... | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 6df9c9b | Slattern! What a wonderful new word. 'Slattern,' I murmur appreciatively to Patricia. 'Yes, slattern,' Bunty says firmly. 'That's what she is.' 'Not a slut like you then?' Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| c3a54d3 | This was love. It didn't come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| fbe0ff5 | Now we must feast!' Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion - it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 12f814c | What was that from? ? But perhaps, truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful lot of reckoning when the time came. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 36153e8 | the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| d7f7127 | Stella was one of Mr Bullock's 'chorus girls' and confessed (readily) to being a 'striptease artiste' but Mr Armitage the opera singer said, "We're all artistes here, darling." "What a bloody fairy that man is," Mr Bullock muttered, "put him in the army, that would sort him out." "I doubt it," Miss Woolf said. (And it did rather beg the question why the strapping Mr Bullock himself had not been called up for active service.) "So," Mr Bulloc.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 29ef369 | We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we?" Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, "But remember, without the cog there is no machine." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 0eefe54 | She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. "Nothing wrong with being a cog," Maurice said, himself now a big wheel in the Home Office. "The world needs cogs." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 94de9fe | I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather's nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| b25b3b1 | Personally, I don't think it right to make up things about real people--although I suppose there's an argument for saying that once you're dead you're not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both). | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 7346a0b | War is Man's greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of those men in the Halifaxes and Stirlings and Lancasters but the bombing war was undoubtedly a brutish affair, a crude method employing a blunt weapon, continually hampered by the weather and lack of technology (despite massive advances that wa.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| d566e4e | This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| cc89224 | On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - .Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 02e9641 | They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| a9b7f59 | CHIEF LAMBIASE IS a frequent visitor to the store, and to justify these visits, he buys books. Because Lambiase doesn't believe in wasting money, he reads the books, too. At first, he had mainly bought mass-market paperbacks--Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson (or whoever writes for James Patterson)--and then A.J. graduates him to trade paperbacks by Jo Nesbo and Elmore Leonard. Both authors are hits with Lambiase, so A.J. promotes him agai.. | Gabrielle Zevin | ||
| 3275345 | You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 36af6a3 | That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you . | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 7f0a3ea | A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a s fragile as a bird's heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 85edbc9 | Best always to praise rather than criticize. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 7e91619 | What a good husband you are", Nancy said afterward, "always taking your wife's side rather thn your mother's." "It's the side of reason I am on", Teddy said, "It just so happens that that's where you're always to be found and my mother rarely." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 7247707 | Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb...and said to his mother, "Can you tidy it up a bit back there?" | gender-roles | Kate Atkinson | |
| 7e33ae3 | Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew--Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie--all bail out successfully from and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future. | alternate-universe butterfly-effect dead ending fractals kate-atkinson ripple-effect survivors twist-ending | Kate Atkinson |