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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 14fcaf9 | Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. "This is a wicked blast," Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes." | 35mm-camera brother canada cape-breton christmas coal fake family nova-scotia photography siblings sister snow snowball-fight wicked-blast | Rebecca McNutt | |
| c9831d7 | Don't you think it's better to continue reading than to just close the book? | close death life reading | Rebecca McNutt | |
| a2c2f3d | One man, an investment banker from Cantor Fitzgerald, took her to see the viewing deck like a good Samaritan since he felt sorry for her, and... and it was like flying, she could see the entire city, she could see the top of the clouds and the ocean, the pink and purple of the late sunset, and he told her, "it's the closest we can ever get to heaven! These buildings connect everyone together like a big community!" "If this is the closest p.. | cute heaven investor september-11-attacks september-11th twin-towers-angel-investor world-trade-center | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 6b9c2b8 | Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning... | dead death die dying grim-reaper heaven hell life | Rebecca McNutt | |
| bf81d56 | Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, .. | digital future future-shock home-movies integrity kodak lonliness movies nostalgia photography popcorn projector retro super-8 vintage | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 3fff438 | Geraldine keeps her eyes trained on him as she slowly reaches into her purse, wrapping her fingers around her gun. "...Callo, I'm so sorry that your life ended up this way," she sighs as she gets out of her side of the car, her feet burning from the cold as her high heels sink into the fallen snow. "Aren't you scared?" "I'm you, Geraldine... I fell into the same trap as you, anyway," Callo answers. His large eyes are shining with tears, but.. | apology dead death depressed depression die dying emotion eyes fear forlorn forlornness friend friendship guilt gun high-heels kill lonliness mental-illness purse regret revolver tears trap usurer | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 75a6320 | Money isn't everything. It's the only thing. | finance greed money | Rebecca McNutt | |
| fef62ac | there's no better system than our own morality, not law, not science, not religion... just decency. | law morality philosophy religion science | Rebecca McNutt | |
| e4c945c | 7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn't the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering "worms and dirt" (chocolate pudding with Oreo coo.. | adult bounce businessman canada car cherry childhood desert diner growing-up kid memory music shirley-temple snow swiss-chalet wind | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 31331dd | Like weddings, funerals are about unity. Funerals are the unity of a person with the sweet hereafter, assuming that one believes in such a thing. | death dying funeral graveyard living mortuary undertaker unity wedding | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 0eaec6c | There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She'd wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naive at times, she wasn't stupid. | conversation friend friendship insane insanity mental-illness ordinary personification psychology talk | Rebecca McNutt | |
| acfd3d5 | I can pretend it's all pretend! I can be the life of your death and you can be the death of my life... what a trade-off! | life pretend sad trade trade-off vow | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 644075a | Tony had spent a great deal of time dwelling on whoever this poor Disney hostess must have been, not as a casualty but as a person. She never got to be an adult, he'd told himself in horror. | america-sings casualty debbie-stone disney disneyland horror sad tragedy tragic | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 349cf3d | It's true, I guess, that no matter how much it sucks, you're supposed to sacrifice things for a friend. It was a concept that he hadn't understood earlier on in his life. In elementary school, Bernie had been assigned 'Charlotte's Web' to read, and he'd always found it selfish how Charlotte the spider gave everything she had to Wilbur the pig, all her time and energy trying to keep this pig alive and off the farmer's dinner plate, only to e.. | friend friendship love pop-culture pop-culture-reference sacrifice sharing smurfs | Rebecca McNutt | |
| ac132cf | When your friend who died was still alive, did you ever tell him?" "Tell him what?" "That you're... what's the word? Celibate?" Tony asked, trailing his fingers along the buttons on the remote control but not really finding himself able to change the channel. His name, his daughter's name, it all could've easily become a statistic, an obituary, had they not left the tower when they did. "I'm asexual, not a celibate," replied the lawyer, "an.. | asexuality attorney carpet celibate lawyer television | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 4b1465b | Bernie cursed and swore like a sailor sometimes, even around young children, to the point where he was kicked out of Disney World during a trip to Orlando, Florida one year. To boot, he'd jabbed a sewing needle into the helium Mickey Mouse balloons of at least twenty kids before a park worker dressed as Cinderella finally called security. "Disney's a greedy, bloodsucking corporation," was Bernie's half-assed excuse. Tony wasn't sure that ev.. | cinderella corporation disney excuse funny kids needle swear weird | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 36282ff | And what if the other kids laugh at me?" Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. "I have a Cape Breton accent! They'll know I'm from Canada and they'll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!" "You're really overreacting," Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. "Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries .. | canada cape-breton funny girl joke morning nostalgia nova-scotia parents pittsburgh polar-bear school seal stereotype teen teenager united-states weird wisdom | Rebecca McNutt | |
| 3d952e4 | people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world | hurt love truth | John Barth | |
| 75efaef | Non c'era ragione di far niente. I miei occhi, come Winckelmann diceva impropriamente delle statue greche, erano senza sguardo, fissi all'eternita, puntati al fine ultimo, e quando cosi stanno le cose non c'e ragione di far nulla, nemmeno di aggiustare il fuoco dei propri occhi. Il che forse e la ragione per cui le statue stanno ferme. Mi aveva colpito la malattia "cosmopsis", la vista cosmica. Quando uno ha questa malattia si irrigidisce c.. | John Barth | ||
| bceea51 | Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love." | John Barth | ||
| ca15d7f | En ningun caso, solia insistir, comprendian los magos necesariamente su arte, a pesar de que la experiencia lo habia llevado a un par de conclusiones generales sobre el tema. Por ejemplo, que cada vez que aprendia algo nuevo sobre sus poderes, esos poderes disminuian, o en todo caso, quedaban alterados. | magia quimera | John Barth | |
| 0a39f93 | Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were. | John Barth | ||
| 193c85a | My classes commenced on the seventh of September, a tall blue day as crisp as the white starched blouses of the coeds who filed into my classroom and nervously took their seats. Standing behind the lectern at eight o'clock sharp, suit fresh-pressed and chin scraped clean, I felt my nostrils flare like a stud's at the nubby tight sex of them, flustered and pink-scrubbed, giggling and moist; my tighs flexed, and I yawned ferociously. | John Barth | ||
| d8bc8f1 | In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom'.. | mythotherapy | John Barth | |
| ad15d56 | Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One.. | John Barth | ||
| c0c2cf8 | All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow | John Barth | ||
| 0b905bb | I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient. | John Barth | ||
| 25dcb65 | Television was soon to eclipse print's inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch. | John Updike | ||
| 4697bb4 | Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. | fat middle-age rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| fea6875 | The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened. | John Updike | ||
| 700065b | Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. | John Updike | ||
| 3c2554d | He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. | diet junk-food nuts rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| b6965c6 | In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. | gluttony rabbit-angstrom rationalization | John Updike | |
| 1e63512 | I love you," he says, and the fact that he doesn't makes it true." | John Updike | ||
| fd1f521 | He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. | faking-it grownups impostor rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| 3ae9860 | He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged s.. | airport foreboding foreshadowing rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| f24ea4c | The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible--think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point. | John Updike | ||
| 0161935 | The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night. | John Updike | ||
| 5f29371 | Walking toward the light. None of us lives in the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us. | John Updike | ||
| 43c7f01 | the books of the 1920s and '30s that are most inviting, with their handy size, generous margins, and sharp letterpress type. | John Updike | ||
| 71b0abe | The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow. | taxes | John Updike | |
| 8402c73 | America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy. | John Updike | ||
| 9996840 | Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it a.. | disdain disparity love rabbit-angstrom | John Updike | |
| 7a501b9 | All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it's hurting someone else. | John Updike |