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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d3aad0c | A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul. | writing | Jane Yolen | |
| abd960d | Happily Ever After Imagine them all after the plotting, after the ball, after the spelling, hopping, sweeping, grumping, grousing, mopping, sleeping, from small glass shoe to nuisance pea, so ever after, all happily be- enchanted with magic from kingdoms to seas. Now close your eyes, and dream of these. | Jane Yolen | ||
| 5f8e161 | Live," he whispered. "For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember." -- | jewish remembrance | Jane Yolen | |
| 88c9dc5 | She would not let herself get lost in the past, making it somehow better and lovelier than it was. She'd never liked that in old people when she was young, and she wasn't about to countenance it in herself now. The past was a lot like Wonderland: treacherous and marvelous and dull in equal measure. Survival was all that mattered - and she was a survivor. Of course, in the end, she thought, there is no such thing as survival. And just as wel.. | Jane Yolen | ||
| f2e03e9 | Somewhere becomes a nightmare. I knock on no doors, make no phone calls. Nowhere becomes my destination. You can find it on the blank spaces of any free map in any old store. Just turn a corner of your mind, and it's there. | Jane Yolen | ||
| 9a4cea7 | The salt smell of the ocean, sharp and steady, called to her from the window. Looking out, she saw her sisters, the waves, beckoning her with their white arms. | mermaids ocean | Jane Yolen | |
| eaa94fc | She left two mermaid tears, crystals with a bit of salt embedded in them, on his pillow. | longing mermaid sadness tears | Jane Yolen | |
| 00be1e8 | Snow White Makes a Plea to the Witch Light a candle. Feed your scrawny cat. Polish your dark house. Buy a new hat. Write odes, darn socks. Repair your crumbling stoop. Put a smile on your face. Pour out that sour soup. Move away from the mines, Far out by the bay. And I beg you, please, Throw that mirror away. | Jane Yolen | ||
| 49a0c4b | Snow Speaks to the Mirror My nose is smudged, my hair in tangles. I do not like myself at angles. Skin's not clear, eyes all red. Another hour in my bed would be a gift, would feel real nice. But can I trust your strange advice? Don't be daft. I won't be guided by a glass that's so one-sided. | Jane Yolen | ||
| 8f820ff | Whatever it was her father wanted, Emma did not know how to provide it. She felt confused by what he did, and imagined the problem was a lack in her, rather than him. And there was something else: | emotional-neglect father worthlessness | Carol Lee | |
| a35d17d | Emma says her illness was a kind of self-hypnosis which obliterated the outside world, a way of escaping life and reducing its proportions to what she could manage. | anorexia-nervosa | Carol Lee | |
| c42ff60 | While she is still hospitalised, I take Emma out for strengthening walks, for her muscles and been under-used for a long time. She is sometimes breathless, I notice with concern, and there are other changes in her, either through a nerve her therapy touches, or through her illness, or both, which make her, quite often, disagreeable to be with. | anorexia anorexic eating-disorder-recovery mental-illness | Carol Lee | |
| 27272f1 | Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior. | binge-eating eating-disorder mental-illness unhealthy-coping | Carol Lee | |
| 647b195 | Why should I, why should anyone, expect her to go on fighting in this way, torn apart, minute by minute? Although I want her to live, I do not believe I have the right to impose it on her, to demand it. Struggling to find a response to her cries for help, one which does not deny her pain or collude with it, I say no one who cares about her would ask her to do what is too difficult. | Carol Lee | ||
| c271223 | She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'. | emotional-distance ignoring-people isolation mental-disorder mental-illness withdrawn | Carol Lee | |
| ff466bf | Kyle agreed. "It would be too weird to see you in makeup and heels and all that hot stuff." "But you just said guys like that," Hannah said. "Right," Paul agreed. He stuck his fork back up his nose and added, "But guys are idiots." | Jahnna N. Malcolm | ||
| fcaeff5 | Dylan, my man!" Kyle Martinez jogged up from the direction of the parking lot and slapped Dylan on the back. "Is Hannah giving you the 4-1-1 on Red Rocks? This girl knows it all." "Yeah," chimed in Paul Hume, who had appeared on Dylan's other side. "It's hard to believe that someone so hot could have brains, too!" Kyle made an over exaggerated point at Hannah from behind his hand as he whispered to Dylan, "Major hottie." "Hottie!" Colby .. | Jahnna N. Malcolm | ||
| f7035d5 | Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies--Nelson Mandela. "Enough," | Robyn Carr | ||
| f4ae472 | Au grand jour, a voix haute, il dit comme Susan Sontag, qui a ecrit la-dessus un essai beau et digne, La Maladie comme metaphore : l'explication psychique du cancer est a la fois un mythe sans fondement scientifique et une vilenie morale, parce qu'elle culpabilise les malades. Cela, c'est la these officielle, la ligne du Parti. Dans le noir, en revanche, il dit ce que disent Fritz Zorn ou Pierre Cazenave : que son cancer n'etait pas un agre.. | Emmanuel Carrère | ||
| 2161f62 | But why me? We haven't spoken since the last divorce hearing." "You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was co.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 28d4f59 | I wish I could tell you how sorry I am," Elizabeth says, "but you've already told me to stop apologizing." "It's just an awful thing to do." "I don't think I'm an awful person," Elizabeth says. "No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism." | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 1e84661 | AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while u.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| b2ffec6 | so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite--" "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped." | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 4c4f632 | She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who'd sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 7eea92b | Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 1ebbfdb | Survival is insufficient | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| bff7ee8 | This is going to seem bitter but I don't mean it that way, V., I'm just stating a fact here: you'll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call and leave a message you'll call me back, but you will never call me first. And I think that's kind of a horrible thing, V., when you're supposed to be someone's friend. I always come to you. You always say you're my friend but you'll never come to me and I think I have to.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| c395dc1 | SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| da94cc3 | Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he'd been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 50307a8 | But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone--probably Sayid--had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes." Peopl.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 544d887 | LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 5751545 | Adulthood's full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. | life sleep | Emily St. John Mandel | |
| 422fc81 | There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the '70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There's a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two .. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| a46b471 | The painted forest collapsed into folds and fell soundlessly to the pavement. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| d2cfbef | We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of ori.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 504ec32 | Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something's very wrong. Everyone's afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 3d4f714 | I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people lik.. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 7994d1f | There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine. The librarian, Francois Diallo, was also the newspaper's | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 4d7bdcb | She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different. | libraries names | Emily St. John Mandel | |
| 49e7651 | He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn't proud of. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 0a9c26d | Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 33fdad3 | What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. | travel | Emily St. John Mandel | |
| d01039c | someone--probably Sayid--had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes." | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| e3806aa | Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he'd been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? | Emily St. John Mandel |