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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d836b10 | In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone. | Francine Prose | ||
| c100eb2 | She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier]--the spirit of the staircase--for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it. | timing | Francine Prose | |
| b08bf24 | Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter. | Francine Prose | ||
| 669b94f | But briefly, Theresa's case has been diagnosed as one of acute hallucinatory psychosis, brought on by a particularly difficult and prolonged adolescent psychosexual adjustment, no doubt aggravated by a somewhat obsessional religious nature. What that means in layman's terms is--as I'm sure you know--Theresa has temporarily lost touch with what we call reality. | Francine Prose | ||
| 460d52e | from the earliest passages to the diary's final entry, in which she talks about her "dual personality," the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her "better, deeper, and purer" self." | Francine Prose | ||
| 4a2be10 | illness of Bep's father--bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking. | Francine Prose | ||
| c7788ac | is starting to happen between the two teenagers: "It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips...and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can't you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?" | Francine Prose | ||
| 6e63c0e | Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious, | Francine Prose | ||
| 9aec733 | The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the cliches and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude. | Francine Prose | ||
| d2a3edd | If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it's just as if a little light goes on inside me. | Francine Prose | ||
| fab70f6 | In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman's version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential. | Francine Prose | ||
| abbd16c | I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people living in the world. | Francine Prose | ||
| 455c59c | Fans of the Peanuts comic strip may also remember Snoopy beginning his novel again and again, always starting with the line 'It was a dark and stormy night' ... In fact, since 1982, San Jose State University has run a writing contest inspired by 'It was a dark and stormy night' ... Charles Dickens opens stave one of A Christmas Carol with 'Once upon a time' ... Similarly, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man begins: 'Once u.. | Christopher Beha | ||
| aee69e0 | The ocean knew where her sailor was. We have seen him, said the waves. He is sleeping with us. You will never kiss his lips or feel the weight of his body again. | Francine Prose | ||
| a101cbc | Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was "unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time." | Francine Prose | ||
| 859b483 | I see the eight of us within our "Secret Annex" as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by black, black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching dangers closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a .. | Francine Prose | ||
| c26f3e4 | convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understand so that she can live there. | Francine Prose | ||
| 2abd5cc | My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunch was delicious. | Francine Prose | ||
| 16dc01f | I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished. | Francine Prose | ||
| 2878c39 | There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react, | Francine Prose | ||
| bb78550 | I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one. | Francine Prose | ||
| 9627eeb | she lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions; | Francine Prose | ||
| 2b6395e | That's the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. | Francine Prose | ||
| d65330e | she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: 'Is this just a joke or does she really mean it? | Francine Prose | ||
| e195d11 | also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety. | Francine Prose | ||
| 58bee6d | Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none. | Francine Prose | ||
| 3a5e682 | words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted. | Francine Prose | ||
| c4094be | The irony, as Slate's Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women--the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham. | Rebecca Traister | ||
| f44d1e7 | The lawyer was a short, ugly, little man. He stood about three feet taller than his desk's two foot eight inch frame and he had dark eyes. Lois couldn't tell if they were black or an extremely dark brown. His hair was dirty blonde and very messy. He looked as if he had just crawled out of bed. His white button up shirt was tucked in on only one side and the other side hung out freely. He wore a pair of tan khakis and a pair of black loafers.. | funny creepy crawl frumpy khakis lawyer loafers pants sleazy unprofessional lazy | Rebecca McNutt | |
| aa7ede2 | The office of my daughter's house is my new home. I sleep on something called a futon. I can sleep comfortably enough. When I wake up in the morning and the light is coming in the window, the painting that she made of koi fish in a pond looks like it is golden and shining. When I lie down on my futon bed in the afternoon or the evening, the gold and shine are gone. Sometimes something looks one way for a time and then becomes another thing... | Rebecca L. Brown | ||
| be4eb26 | Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China's giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservati.. | Rebecca Skloot | ||
| 25b3986 | Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. "In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was," she said. "Oh, that's the brown woman with the baby and the dog." This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was "right next to a shady .. | Rebecca Traister | ||
| 799e786 | I am here to help her learn," Tansy said, "not to keep her from it." -- | teach learn school | Richard Peck | |
| 83375f9 | Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats. | Richard Peck | ||
| 867ec66 | At school we practiced for the Christmas program all month long. Miss Butler couldn't sing either, but she was a feisty director. . . . She took the Christmas program personally, as teachers do. | Richard Peck | ||
| c0e1fc5 | Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago. | Richard Peck | ||
| 71885ec | We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their wat.. | Richard Peck | ||
| 45c7d8e | Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds. | Richard Peck | ||
| b53226c | But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality. | Richard Peck | ||
| 6c11dc9 | You are everything that's ever been my favorite thing," she wanted to tell him. "You are my love song, my birthday cake, the sound of ocean waves and French words and a baby's laugh. You're a snow angel, creme brulee, a kaleidoscope filled with glitter. I love you and you'll never catch up, because I've gotten a head start and my heart is racing at light speed." Someday" | Lisa Kleypas | ||
| c7f40c2 | The Louvre's much restored three wings or pavilions, the Sully, Denon, and Richelieu, were once the galleries where courtiers enjoyed royal hospitality and entertainments (and The Princesse de Cleves her secret surges of immoral passion). On a quiet un-crowded evening visit to the Louvre, it's easy to imagine the masked and dancing couples in these pavilions, the rustle of silk, the whisperings of lovers, the royal entourage. The Louvre's a.. | Susan Cahill | ||
| 081ee5e | Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others; whatever seemed wrong to me, others approved of. I ran into feuds wherever I found myself, I met disfavor wherever I went; if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery; so I had to be called "Woeful": Woe is all I possess." | Caleb Carr | ||
| b1bb12b | The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well--for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth? | Caleb Carr | ||
| 18dd4ef | But my cognitive brain fought back hard, telling me that I knew these scenarios were unlikely, that whatever rationalizations she might have for the staging of the four deaths we knew of, to say nothing of her manipulations of other people, including me, would prove inadequate. I even tried the habit that Mike and I consistently warned our students against, listening to my gut; but all my gut told me was that I had fallen in love with a gir.. | Caleb Carr |