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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d117d6c | Claire looked at the anniversary painting again. She thought about Paul as a child. She'd seen pictures--his winsome, toothy grin; the way his ears poked out from his giant head when he was six and seven; the way everything started to catch up when puberty hit. He wasn't dashing or flashy, but he was handsome, once she'd talked him into wearing contacts and buying nice suits. And he was funny. And he was charming. And he was so damn smart t.. | Karin Slaughter | ||
| 420ce13 | My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked .. | baking lane-edelstein scents | Aimee Bender | |
| 0907924 | In the evenings, my father and I ate dinner quietly in front of the TV together. Wednesday night, Thursday. Frozen dinners I'd picked out at the grocery store, greatest hits by my favorite factories. One of the best ones, in Indiana, prided itself on a no touch food assembly, which meant every step was monitored by robotic arms, ones that placed the tortillas into the dish, layered them with cheese, dropped dollops of tomato sauce on top, a.. | food-factories greatest-hits grocery-shopping indiana ingredients rose-edelstein | Aimee Bender | |
| 8cb8f2f | In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield. | Aimee Bender | ||
| afb78e0 | I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver .. | emotions food moods restaurants rose-edelstein walks-of-life | Aimee Bender | |
| e7e9cc3 | My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the cou.. | food-sensor oranges rose-edelstein | Aimee Bender | |
| 84d9b9c | What I taste, I said, reading from my page, is what I remember from my last Dorito, plus the chemicals that are kind of like that taste, and then my zoned-out mind that doesn't really care what it actually tastes like. Remembering, chemicals, zoning. It is a magical combo. All these parts form together to make a flavor sensation trick that makes me want to eat the whole bag and then maybe another bag. Do you have another bag? asked a skateb.. | doritos rose-edelstein taste | Aimee Bender | |
| 7c421a9 | George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathro.. | george-malcolm helixes physics shapes spirals | Aimee Bender | |
| 9f1804c | The sensor did not seem to be restricted to my mother's food, and there was so much to sort through, a torrent of information, but with George there, sitting in the fading warmth of the filtered afternoon springtime sun spilling through the kitchen windows, making me buttered toast which I ate happily, light and good with his concentration and gentle focus, I could begin to think about the layers. The bread distributor, the bread factory, t.. | buttered-toast food-sensor layers wisconsin | Aimee Bender | |
| b5c81ab | Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected. | desert-blooms joseph-edelstein rare-mom siblings | Aimee Bender | |
| c26f490 | On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welc.. | ingredients lane-edelstein lemon-cake rose-edelstein | Aimee Bender | |
| 262f6f9 | I bit into the oatmeal. Same levels- now the oats, well dried, but not so well watered, then the raisins, half tasteless, made from parched grapes, picked by thirsty workers, then the baker, rushed. The whole cookie was so rushed, like I had to eat it fast or it would, somehow, eat me. | in-a-rush ingredients oatmeal-cookies | Aimee Bender | |
| 3b1e319 | By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 3cb11da | She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. "Someone else should speak instead," he said. "If I don't speak, it means someone else will," which did not always turn out to be true." | Aimee Bender | ||
| 5a8e692 | My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch- the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We'd looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfol.. | lemon-flavor mother-and-daughter rose-edelstein sour | Aimee Bender | |
| ee0c108 | Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 8ddd31c | Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, .. | grief loss the-devourings | Aimee Bender | |
| 8a480bc | There's an exercise I'll do sometimes with a class in which we'll start with a word; I'll give everyone a word, and they'll write based on that word, and as they're writing I'll interrupt often and tell them to write more on the setting they're developing. I'll stop the process again and give intrusive instructions about developing the character in the setting, and on and on. The purpose of this is to allow the development of the fruit that.. | Christopher Beha | ||
| ba8fa62 | A few years ago, I listened to a rabbi give a talk and she was explaining what a blessing is. It is a naming of something, she said. What you are blessing already has to be latent in the person, otherwise it doesn't mean anything. But if it is (latent), and you bless what hasn't yet come forth - the fruit - it is a very powerful action. Think of your writing as bestowing a blessing. I'll leave you with that. (Aimee Bender, "On the Making of.. | Christopher Beha | ||
| 03f925f | My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen doo.. | emotions enjoyment food food-sensor french ingredients la-lyonnaise moods rose-edelstein | Aimee Bender | |
| 2142dd7 | She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world- didn't seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter- I hadn't ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach- with a good farm's care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into.. | chicken ingredients madame-dupont recognition taste | Aimee Bender | |
| 73b49bb | I loved my dish towel. This one was two-toned, and had, on one side, stitchings of fat purple roses on a lavender background, and on the other side, fat lavender roses on a purple background. Which side to use? An optical-illusion namesake with which I could dry our dishes. It was soft and worn and smelled like no-nonsense laundry detergent. | dish-towel lavender optical-illusion purple rose-edelstein roses two-toned | Aimee Bender | |
| 9fa71f0 | She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind. | texting | Aimee Bender | |
| fc44453 | Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living. --The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin | Aimee Bender | ||
| 7e704d2 | She is walking around the living room naked and | Aimee Bender | ||
| 28f4205 | We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke. | kiss kissing | Aimee Bender | |
| b4c61e0 | An old man with overalls walked by; I don't think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers. | fashion fashion-humor funny | Aimee Bender | |
| f205284 | Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building. | humor losing-jobs | Aimee Bender | |
| 2578815 | Does it work with sandwiches? he asked. I didn't move. He handed it over. George was watching with a kind of neutral curiosity, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, so I just unwrapped it and took a bite. It was a homemade ham-and-cheese-and-mustard sandwich, on white bread, with a thin piece of lettuce in the middle. Not bad, in the food part. Good ham, flat mustard from a functional factory. Ordinary bread. Tired lettuce-pickers. .. | ingredients love-me sandwich yelling | Aimee Bender | |
| 69d20f2 | I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 79c0e77 | But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction is subtle, but it is not just one plain grey, that I can promise...I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock trying to see into its color scheme. | perception the-color-master | Aimee Bender | |
| d578ae3 | It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...' 'Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.' Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color:.. | fire perception seeing sun | Aimee Bender | |
| b8f48a1 | But the fact was, Sherrie Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn't flinch. His face was him to her now. It was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he needed to alter. | first-impressions love symmetry | Aimee Bender | |
| 73c0b57 | He said he hated talking and just wanted to look into my eyes and tell me things that way. I let him and it made my skin lift, the things in his look. | Aimee Bender | ||
| a8b5cef | Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance - a decl.. | Mike Davis | ||
| d8683e3 | The process occurs in the U.S. and globally. Thus, many analysts have found other names for such surplus populations suffering exploitation. Comparative literature theorist Rob Nixon writes of "remaindered humans" as the compacted left-overs "on whom neoliberalism's inequities bear down most heavily."[72] Mike Davis has discussed them as what the system sees: mere "global residium."[73] Annu Jalais in India references these groups as neolib.. | Mark Lewis Taylor | ||
| a211b84 | Spurned by the upper class, Wood garnered support from the organized workers. Ira B. Davis denounced the Wall Street Democratic renegades, noting that none had objected when the state government bailed out the banks: apparently what was "virtuous in them" was "a crime in Mayor Wood or the workingmen." | Mike Wallace | ||
| 101e5e7 | people, people in every room: Clare, Viviana, Clare's new father Gordon, Teo's parents, my parents, Rose sleeping her fragrant sleep a few feet away. "We'll get hotel rooms," everyone had offered, but we told them all, "No. Stay." Sometimes, I think I would like to have us under one roof, all of us, everybody here, which makes no sense, of course. No house is big enough to hold us, with all of our tensions, all our wariness and histories. B.. | Marisa de los Santos | ||
| a7ac717 | own independent exhibition, marketing it as an American Salon des Refuses. In February 1908 eight painters showcased their work at the Macbeth Galleries. The Eight, as critic James Huneker baptized them, included Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn--the Philadelphia Five--and three others, stylistically different but equally determined to crack open NAD's restrictive practices: symbolist Arthur B. Davies (who was well wired into wealthy.. | Mike Wallace | ||
| e46d309 | Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region's h.. | Mike Davis | ||
| f3051b1 | Mike wasn't religious, but it was pretty cool to imagine a superghost carrying you when shit got a little too real. | religion | Aric Davis | |
| e97cddf | A recent Chicago study, for example, has shown that it costs $60,000 to hook up a new house in an outer suburb to the utility infrastructure as against $5,000 for the same house in an existing suburb. "Who foots the bill? Taxpayers in the established suburbs."72" | Mike Davis | ||
| bcfebcc | Day an' night they set in a room with a checker-board on th' end iv a flour bar'l, an' study problems iv th' navy. At night Mack dhrops in. 'Well, boys,' says he, 'how goes th' battle?' he says. 'Gloryous,' says th' Sthrateejy Board. 'Two more moves, an' we'll be in th' king row.' 'Ah,' says Mack, 'this is too good to be thrue,' he says. 'In but a few brief minyits th' dhrinks'll be on Spain,' he says. 'Have ye anny plans f'r Sampson's flee.. | Finley Peter Dunne | ||
| 26a9f9c | Old age ain't no place for sissies," actress Bette Davis" -- | Mike Nichols |