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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 94103fe | Remember," she says on the way to the white car, "we don't hug strangers. Even nice ones." "Why not?" "We just don't, we save our hugs for people we love." "I love that boy Walker." "Jack, you never saw him before in your life." | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 35c5c8b | Yeah, but for me, see, Jack was everything. I was alive again, I mattered. So after that I was polite." "Polite? Oh, you mean with--" "It was all about keeping Jack safe." "Was it agonizingly hard to be, as you put it, polite?" Ma shakes her head. "I did it on autopilot, you know, Stepford Wife." The" | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 634e244 | says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre to see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the army at Little Bighorn. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 9436e8d | But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement--did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 654bf27 | Work will be your mother, she whispered; it will lead you through dark days; it will clear you a level place to rest at last. | workaholic | Emma Donoghue | |
| 0146a6b | They're her book club but I don't know why because they're not reading books. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| e469d6b | We go in a skyscraper that's Paul's office, he says he's crazy busy but he makes a Xerox of my hands and buys me a candy bar out of the vending machine. Going down in the elevator pressing the buttons, I play I'm actually inside a vending machine. We go in a bit of the government to get Grandma a new Social Security card because she lost the old one, we have to wait for years and years. Afterwards she takes me in a coffee shop where there's.. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 711b8b8 | was interesting." "Is that what your ma says to say when you don't like something?" She smiles a bit. "I taught her that." "Is she dying by now?" | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 2392f11 | What this good man had sworn to protect me from was not the same as what I feared. I trusted that he would never let anything hurt me, but he would never let anything touch me either. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 718a694 | So much of motherhood is acting. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| e4789cf | In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then eve.. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| da6c7cd | Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear. In | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 00535be | If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could. We | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 6d92e51 | It's called mind over matter. If we don't mind, it doesn't matter." When" | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 3a81ce6 | It depends on the monster, if it's a real one or not and if it's where I am. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 828076b | Under the thousand crystal candelabras I danced with ten elderly gentlemen who had nothing to say but did not let that stop them. I answered only, Indeed and Oh yes and Do you think so? | fairytale-retelling | Emma Donoghue | |
| f313ca3 | Everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 90b262b | My names were hand-me-downs too: girl, the creature, or, most often, you there. | fairytale-retelling | Emma Donoghue | |
| 8a09b61 | except one bit about a movie with werewolves and a woman bursting like a balloon is just special effects, that's drawing on computers. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| a304d83 | Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 5965076 | We spend most of our lives holding on to objects, he thought, and finally they fall from our cold dead hands and those who tidy up after us have to worry of what to do with all this stuff. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 2645481 | He supposed it was always that way with the dead, they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| a034f44 | My future was about to happen. | retelling | Emma Donoghue | |
| 09655ec | A veces estaria bien volver a hacerse pequeno y a veces grande, igual que Alicia. | Emma Donoghue | ||
| 4e3e315 | I win, and we discover that when men peer into a car that is blasting "True Faith" on the outskirts of San Franscisco, they are disappointed to see three women." | Emma Forrest | ||
| 302d503 | And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. | Emma Forrest | ||
| ae6e39a | Now here I am, seventeen with a bullet. | Emma Forrest | ||
| 0c3dfc7 | I thought of him, with his feet in the Chateau Marmont pool and his fork in a carrot cake. He was just a little kid. I was upset at what I had introduced him to, the records and films he didn't already know. I felt like a mother who had left syringes around the room and let her baby get hooked on hard drugs. | Emma Forrest | ||
| 93711b8 | Funny. The blazer, skirt and tie become automatically sexy the minute you leave school when you're eighteen or nineteen and pull it out for fancy-dress parties. But whilst you're still there, stewing through Math, unable to find anyone who'll let you sit next to them in the cafeteria, crying in the toilet stalls, you know what it represents and you can't bring yourself to make it look alluring. That would be traitorous and phoney. I knew I .. | Emma Forrest | ||
| c9be1ca | A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike. One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn't what one had expected of life. Not in the very least. | Jean Rhys | ||
| a8ca154 | The car stopped. Everybody walked in a short procession up to the chapel of the Crematorium, where a clergyman with very bright blue yes was waiting. That was a dream, too, but a painful dream, because she was obsessed with the feeling that she was so close to seeing the thing that was behind all this talking and posturing, and that the talking and posturing were there to prevent her from seeing it. Now it's time to get up; now it's time to.. | Jean Rhys | ||
| b128450 | Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away. | despair hope reading | Jean Rhys | |
| a11b470 | I hope that gay gentleman will be safe. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 0f42d8d | I had had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn't read; they didn't like it. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart - all complete. | dreary drugged heart job read sawdust silk success women | Jean Rhys | |
| 8b32c7f | Wasn't it quite difficult being a wicked girl? Even more difficult than being a good one? | wicked-girl | Jean Rhys | |
| f17ba14 | The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 0efb692 | We'll put Mado on the joy wheel, and watch her being banged about a bit. Well, she ought to amuse us sometimes; she ought to sing for her supper; that's what she's here for, isn't it? | Jean Rhys | ||
| f0b1480 | Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself. | crying lonely old-age | Jean Rhys | |
| c3c5cb5 | Lois doesn't want to be given away; she doesn't want anybody to know, and I assure you that that's all she cares about. Of course, she'll be furious if anybody knows, and that's why if you go off in a hurry you will make things difficult for me.' She felt hypnotized as she listened to him, impotent. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 84f0b90 | There is no control over memory. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 0b9a78d | He was still looking steadily at her. His eyes were clear, cool and hard, but something in the depths of them flickered and shifted. She thought: 'He'd take any advantage he could -- fair or unfair. Caddish he is.' Then as she stared back at him she felt a great longing to put her head on his knees and shut her eyes. To stop thinking. Stop the little wheels in her head that worked incessantly. To give in and have a little peace. The unutter.. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 1051c15 | There was a vase of flame-coloured tulips in the hall - surely the most graceful of flowers. Some thrust their heads forward like snakes, and some were very erect, stiff, virginal, rather prim. Some were dying, with curved grace in their death. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 0820440 | The prayer ended, 'May Almighty God defend us.' And God who is indeed mysterious, who had made no sign when they burned Pierre as he slept - not a clap of thunder, not a flash of lighting - mysterious God heard Mr Mason at once and answered him. The yells stopped. | Jean Rhys | ||
| 80f1531 | Nobody's hidden your dress", she said. "It's hanging in the press". She lookked at me and said, "I don't believe you know how long you've been here, you poor creature". "On the contrary", I said, "only I know how long Ihave been here. Nights and days, and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has meaning. Wh.. | Jean Rhys |