- the deliberate repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs.
- "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender." (Winston Churchill's speech, "We Shall Fight on the Beaches")
- "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget
these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." (Elie Wiesel, Night, page 34)
39 comments:
They race. They race in July and they race in January. They race in the rain and they race in the snow. Although they race side by side, they are actually racing away from each other, sifting thiemselves apart.
"Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours. We played until dark. We played until the streetlights lit up the court. We played until the bats swooped down at our heads. We played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the dark sky. We didn't keep score." Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, page 230
"Jakie Meyer. Delaware, 1967. Thirteen.
A chair knocked over, its underside...
Flora Hernandez.Delaware, 1963. Eight.
He'd only wanted to touch her, but she screamed...
Leah Fox. Delaware, 1969. Twelve.
On a slipcovered couch under a highway on-ramp, he..."
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold.
(page 181)
"We saw so much that day: the butterflies, to be sure, cases and cases of them, from Brazil, from Madagascar, even a brother of my blue butterfly from Down Under...We saw crystals and cougars, muskrats and mummies, fossils and more fossils."
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Tarveler's Wife, page 24
"Vivi stared at her hands. She stared at her tennis racket which lay on the ground where she had dropped it. She thought of homemade blackberry ice cream and the way Jack's face looked when he played music. She thought of the tough of his hand on her shoulder when they danced."
Rebecca Wells, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood, page 239
"Neither he nor Hatsue had wanted the war to come-neither of them had wanted that intrusion."
-Pg.326
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
"I wanted nothing to do with that. Instead, I wanted to live my life witht he same focus as most people-to worry about my childeren's education, but whether I would be around to see them graduate, to rejoice that i had lost five pounds, and not be fearful that my muscle mass was eroding away. I wanted what had become impossible: I wanted to forget.
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife, Page 23
"our eyes are shining, our skin is rosy, our all-knowing smiles are back. Our bodies feel like luxurious sighs as we stand in the great hall, completely invisible."
-Libba Bray, "A Great and Terrible Beauty"(page 334)
"I smell beer, I smell bourbon, I smell sweat, I smell my own fear, ranker and stronger than all three." (pg. 4)
Black and Blue By: Anna Quindlen
"They punish by calling a girl on the phone to say that there's a party and she's not invited. They punish by walking up to girls with insults about their clothers or bodies. They punish by nicknames and derogatory labels. They punish by picking a certain girl, usually one who is relatively happy, and making her life miserable."
(Mary Phipher's Reviving Ophelia page 68)
"I want you to chip away at that myth by standing. I want you--yes, you--to call them liars. I want you to show them that you are as much a man--more a man than they can ever be."
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (page 192)
"It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always." (page 203)
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
"Proof: I remained alive day after day, week after week. Proof: he did not attack me, even when I was aslee on the tarpaulin. Proof: I am here to tell you this story." (page 282)
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
"In the deeper hours of the night I began to look at myself, to consider myself and my condition, to measure the life I'd led so far. I did not know what made me this way. I did not know of any other way I could be. I did not know what was inside me or how I could redeem what was hidden there."
(Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, page 80)
"I will not die. I refuse it. Iwill beat the odds. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds as great as they are."
(Yann Martel's Life of Pi, page 148)
"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your skin is like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in that moment. Which is not where I want to be."
(Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale page 143)
“I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments... I believe he knew he was in his own bed, that his books and his notes... were nearby."
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
(187-188)
It is not merely a question of a procession to a bucket; it is the rule that the last user of the bucket goes and empties it in the latrines; it is also the rule that at night one must not leave the hut except in night uniform, giving one's number to the guard.
-Pg. 61
Survival in Auschwitz
"I smell beer, I smell bourbon, I smell sweat, I smell my own fear; ranker and stronger than all three.
I smell it now in the vast waiting room of Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia."
Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen, p. 6
"But God's hat was unraveling. God's pants were falling apart. God's cat was a constant danger. God's ark was a jail. God's wide acres were slowly killing me. God's ear didn't seem to be listening."
Pg 262 (Life of Pi - Yann Martel)
"There were many seas. The sea roared like a tiger. The sea whispered in your ear like a friend telling you secrets. The sea clinked like small change in a pocket. The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea sounded like someone vomiting. The sea was dead silent."
-Yann Martel
(Life of Pi pg. 272)
"I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward. . . . I wondered if little Mickey had ever seen sunlight come though the windows of a front room apartment. . . . Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life." (potok, chaim "the chosen")
The phone rang.
She decided to ignore it.
She decided to answer it.
She decided to ignore it.
She decided to check caller-id.
She looked at the phone display.
She turned off the phone and continued speaking.
But the moment before turning off the phone broke down further into submoments:
She worried that it might be a specific person.
She saw that it was.
She turned off the phone with an angry snap.
But this submoment broke down into even more sub-submoments:
She grieved.
Pain shot through her like a lightning strike.
(Steve Martin The Pleasure of my Company, page 31-32)
"Mother had not had a heart attack. Mother had not died. Mother had been alive all the time. And Father had lied about this."
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, p. 112
"He wanted the papers returned, signed. He wanted the house. He wanted the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. Because he wanted ti get married again, to someone else."
Amy Than, The Joy Luck Club, Page 194
"I could almost smell the bland steam that was the smell of cooking in my parents' house. I could almost hear the soft woosh of my father sucking oxygen hungrily through the heavy black rubber mask. And I could almost see the notes my mother left for me next to the stove in her angular handwriting..." Anna Quindlen, Black and Blue p. 21
"He would guard his advantage. The secrets would remain secret-the things he'd seen, the things he'd done. He would repair what he could, he would endure, he would go from year to year without letting on that there were tricks." (46)
In the Lake of the Woods
TIm O'Brien
"He has turned his back on the only family he knows. He is without patronage, without a home. He is alone, like me." Libba Bray's Rebel Angels p. 491
“I was strong. I was pure. . . I was like the wind.”
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Page 58)
“But then later and later at night, I thought about it this way: How I was sorry I did not marry Lin. Because if I had, I would not have married the other man. I would not have become the kind of wife who prayed the Japanese would kill her husband. I would not have become the kind of mother who could not grieve when her children died. I would not have poisoned my mind thinking of ways to escape my marriage, only to bite my flesh every day that I did not. And I would not have regretted that I had so little left to give my second husband and that I could be only grateful, never completely happy.”
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife (Page 68)
"Maybe the Teacher had been trying to reach him all this time. Maybe something had gone terribly wrong." (Page 230)
Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code
Then I did not see him. Then I saw him again, walking slowly beneath the tree. Then he was gone again and I did not know if I was seeing him or not, if I had been asleep before and was awake now, or if I had been awake before and was dreaming now. Then I saw him again, walking slowly, alone; then he entered a shadow and was gone.
~ My Name is Asher Lev (pg98)
"I am not Nell Hawkin's Lady Hope. I am not the Most High, the one to bring back the glory of the Order and the magic. I am Gemma Doyle, and I have failed. I am so tired."
-Libba Bray,"Rebel Angels"(page 475)
But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.
The Things They Carried (pg 175)
"There was nothing to figure out. There was Sidda's heart beating. There was the heart of the planet beating. There was enought time. She was not afraid"
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. (Page 413)
"We are sarisfied with this. When one waits time moves smoothly without need to intervene and drive forward, while when one works,every minute moves painfully and has to be laboriously driven away. We are always happy to wait; we are capable of waiting for hours with complete obtuse inertia of spiders in old webs."
Survival in Auschwitz (page 104)
Primo Levi
Someone splashed water on me and I looked around at the faces of colored boys and girls who had probably never tasted possum meat, whose fingertips had never been bloodied by the cotton plant, who had never been spit at or told to go to the back door, who were accustomed to looking white people in the eye, and I wished that Ruth was there. --Brenda Woods, The Red Rose Box, p. 117
"The rest of the kids in my class were trying to figure out which way they were going, but my dad had taught me how to cut back against the grain, how to reverse fields, how to straight-arm tacklers."
Gym Candy by Carl Deuker, p. 7
I hesitated, that day, my mouth full of words. Me, too, I wanted to say. I have those names in my family, too. I wanted to say, I’m not the oldest. There’s Adam and Nathaniel (like your Nathan) and Finn. I wanted to say I have a sister named Emily – just like your wife. She’s older than me. But her mind is slow. I wanted to say all that, but I just kept searching for a book.
–from The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams
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