“I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping pages regularly, but I had abandoned the text altogether, taken over the story, and made up my own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him, the words on the page were a scramble of codes, indecipherable, mysterious. Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys.” (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 30)
[after Macy tells Wes about her dad’s death] “And then it was done. Over. I could feel my breath coming quickly, through my teeth, and for a second I felt unsteady, as if with this story no longer held so closely against me, I’d lost my footing. Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.” (Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever, page 180, emphasis added)
“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.” (Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, page 275)
"I'm floating inside my skin. I could go on floating like this for days. Right now,the real world with its heartbreak and disappointments is just a pulse against the protective membrane we've drunk ourselves into." (Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 141
"But my dad loved to cook big breakfasts on Sunday. He said that was his form of worship, and the kitchen was his church, his offering eggs and bacon and biscuits and..." "Waffles," Wes finished for me." Sarah Dessen's The truth about forever pg 212
"The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf." (John Knowles' A Separate Peace, page 158)
"Her kimono was a brocade in shades of brown and gold. Below her waist, deer in their rich brown coloring of autumn nuzzled one another, with golds and rust behind them in a patter like fallen leaves on a forest floor." -Arthur Golden, "Memoirs of a Geisha"
"Perfect beauty is a strong expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it: as sweet features as ever the temperate clime of Albion moulded; as pure hues of rose and lily as ever as her humid gales and vapoury skiesgenerated and screened, justified, in this instance, the term." (Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, page 369)
"At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows."
"At the beds, the four hunched bodachs might have been priests of a diabolic religion, Aztecs at the altar of human sacrifice, as their hands moved sinuously and ceaselessly in ritualistic pantomime over the sleeping girls."
"I open my eyes again and i know what i have to do. I look around, my heart a jackhammer in my chesst, blood thickening in my eyes."(Khaled Hossein's The Kite Runner, page 345)
He wasn't infatuated with her, but instead he loved her so quietly that he thought he would soon forget her, although when he considered the prospect of forgetting her his love for her grew, and this made him remember that heavy blizzards start as gentle and persistent snow.
A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin, page 158
"I can hear music leaking out of the bar. The abandoned ghost train track looms over the street in the sodium vapor glare and as I open the door someone starts to blow a trumpet and hot jazz smacks me in the chest. I walk into it like a drowning man, which is what I have come here to be."
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger pg. 119
"Time passes by and the pain beings to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth."
-The time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, Pg. 402
"No girls escape the hurricane. The winds are simply too overpowering. Fortunately no storm lasts forever. By late high school the winds of the hurricane are dying down and trees begin to right themselves. Girls calm down. Their thinking is more mature and their feelings more subtle. Their friends have become kinder and more dependable. They make peace with their parents. Their judgment has improved and they are less self-absorbed. The resisters and fighters survive. When it's storming, it feels like the storm will never end, but the hurricane does end and the sun comes out again." (Mary Phipher's Reviving Ophelia page 281)
"[The Taliban is] a nasty germ, a dangerously virulent microbe that propagates by spreading a serious disease insidiously fatal to the freedom of women."
"The letter sang with phrases that I swear lifted me like a tonic: '"Life is a thornbush from which roses spring; all the hearts in Texas are wishing for you..."
(Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, page 61)
"As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells where it would let out a huge sneeze..." (Golden, 8)
"We're all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they'd like to be seen." (Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 305)
"You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down." (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, page 323)
"And while she slept I read by the window or watched her bed until it was an ocean and the blankets were waves I had never seen except in my head. And I thought of how far I am from the water rolling but I am here with an old women breathing at the same time with her."
"I repeated his name because it took the place of prayer. Anatole's name anchored me to the earth, the water, the skin that held me in like a jar of water. I was a ghost in a jar." (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible page 311)
"The fight with Father to break away from home, the fight in the cafeteria for a piece of meat-when I went through those experiences I thought them privations and losses; now I saw them treasure chests of insight. What countless riches lay buried under the ground of those early years that I had thought so black, so barren, so thwarted with want!" (Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers pg 223)
" You are in a boat that is being tossed around by the winds of the world. The voices of your parents, you teachers, your friends and the media can blow you east, then west, then back again. To stay on course you must follow your own North Star, your sense of who you truly are."
"striding up the side aisle directly towards him came adark monster of a man. Even in the glow of the fire, his eyes burned black."(Angels and Demons Pg. 257
"The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth." (Steve Martin The Pleasure of my Company, page 24)
"A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one's early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this times I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me being effectively awake."(Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, page 60)
"It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting." (Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner, page 371)
As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. (Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, page 14)
"I was surprised that it had taked so long for Patty Bancroft to come looking for me. I had become her bad child, her prodigal daughter, the kind of person, like Maeve Banning at Queen of Peace, who always wound up in the principal's office, in the hot seat." (Black and Blue 205)
Perhaps this is why Cecily,Martha, and Elizabeth loathe me so and only tolerate my presence when Felicity is around. For my part, I find their minds to be as corseted as their waists, with conversations limited to parties, dressed and the misfortunes or shortcomings of others. I should rather take my chances with the lions of Rome's ancient Colosseum than endure another tea chat with the likes of them. At least the lions are honest about their desire to eat you and make no effort to hide it.
"Bobby, one black apostrophe of hair over his forehead, saying, "Hey Fran Flynn. I guess if everyone likes you I might like you too."" Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen page 96
The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien "Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something."
"We never went to church," I explained, "even though my mother always thought we should, and she was always feeling guilty about it. But my dad loved to cook big breakfasts on Sunday. He said that was his form of worship, and the kitchen was his church, his offering eggs and bacon and biscuits and..."
Sometimes, Soraya sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
A nasty germ, a dangerously virulent microbe that propagates by spreading a serious disease insidiously fatal to the freedom of women. This microbe is highly infectious. The Taliban...
"He had met another who thrilled to the same fantasies of mindless slaughter, and together they had grown into a beast with two faces, two hatefule hearts, and four busy hands to do the devil's work."
"The nuts and bolts of raising us was left to Mommy, who acted as chief surgeon for bruises ("Put iodine on it"),war secretary ("If somebody hits you,take your fist and crack 'em"),religious consultant ("Put God first"), chief psychologist ("Don't think about it"),and financial adviser ("What's money if your mind is empty?")." The Color of Water by James McBride pg. 9
"Now that armies of black clouds had stormed the entire sky, his room was a sooty-smelling pit brightened only fitfully by nature's war light, filled with a rapid patter that brought to mind an image of a horde of running rats."
"Then I can carry on undisturbed with my work on the secret plan. I'm going to dive down into the major's unconscious. That's where I'll be until we meet again."
"And after last evening, with my canny near-seduction of his girlfriend, I felt I was Bugs Bunny and Mercury to his Elmer Fudd and Thor." (The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin, page 42)
" The wind came back with fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if he meant to measure their puny might against his. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching god." (Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God.)
"If it wasn't him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face.
"I am at the bottom of a well. The walls are damp and slimy. My fingers slip on the mossy stones. Sometimes i think i will never be able to pull myself out of this dark place."
"All night the cicades and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin look like beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass of water I held to her crusted lips."
(page 335) The Time Travelor's Wife Audrey Niffenegger
"Augusta had run the whole way to Bainbridge Memorial (Hospital) clutching hope to her chest, a package that grew heavier and more unwieldly witht every step."
"The rides were best viewed in the dark, an escapade in gaily lit rust, powered by unmuffled tractor engines that competed with the wavering carnival music which squawked loudly from somewhere in the middle of it all." (Frank Peretti, This Present Darkness, p. 9)
Isabella says that if she had been born a cute little antolope and saw the cheetah coming she would just kick another cute little antolope in the shins so it couldn't run very fast, and the cheetah would get it instead of her. -Dear Dumb Diary #5
Cody had several family members who were known athletes, and he's always bragging about them. "That's right, from now on I am the straw that stirs the drink...in the Eagle's nest, I am Big Bird." -Go Long
I thought of my mother and father in one such photo, sitting in the sand on a beach at Lake Erie. It was taken before they wer married, when I imagine the word husband on my mother's tonge still had the tang of a rare, exotic fruit. -The Book of Illumination
"The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and make its steady dash homeward, to the ocean. The sun was sinking fast, and a laundry line full of cirrus clouds stretched along the western sky like boas of white linen, then surrendered to a shiver of gold that haloed my father's head." (Pat Conroy, South of Broad, p. 80)
"Like two giants they crashed against each other. They rose high in the air, bending first one way and then the other. There was a roar as if great spears were breaking in battle and in the red light of the sun the spray that flew around them looked like blood.
Slowly the second wave forced the first one backward, rolled slowly over it, and then as the victor drags the vanquished, moved in toward the island.
The wave struck the cliff. It sent long tongues streaming around me so that I could neither see nor hear. The tongues of water licked into all the crevices, dragged at my hand and at my bare feet gripping the ledge. They rose high above me on the face of the rock, up and up, and then spent themselves against the sky and fell back, hissing past me to join the water rushing on toward the cove."
80 comments:
“I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping pages regularly, but I had abandoned the text altogether, taken over the story, and made up my own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him, the words on the page were a scramble of codes, indecipherable, mysterious. Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys.” (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 30)
[after Macy tells Wes about her dad’s death] “And then it was done. Over. I could feel my breath coming quickly, through my teeth, and for a second I felt unsteady, as if with this story no longer held so closely against me, I’d lost my footing. Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.” (Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever, page 180, emphasis added)
“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.” (Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, page 275)
My head ached like the devil, and now awake, my terror was sharpened against the whetstone of the unknown.
-Rebel Angels, by Libba Bray, Page 6
"I dive into the stream of fourth-period lunch students and swim down the hall to the cafeteria." Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, page 7.
"I'm floating inside my skin. I could go on floating like this for days. Right now,the real world with its heartbreak and disappointments is just a pulse against the protective membrane we've drunk ourselves into." (Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 141
"But my dad loved to cook big breakfasts on Sunday. He said that was his form of worship, and the kitchen was his church, his offering eggs and bacon and biscuits and..." "Waffles," Wes finished for me."
Sarah Dessen's The truth about forever pg 212
"From the access road, Gandolfo resembled a great stone monster pondering a suicidal leap."
Dan Brown-The Da Vinci Code-pg.162
"I detected no Sherlock Holmes among them, nor even a Dr. Watson."
(John Knowles' A Separate Peace, page 83)
"The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf." (John Knowles' A Separate Peace, page 158)
"There is a beast in my gut, i can hear it scraping away at the insides of my ribs."
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, page 51.
"The moon was a thin, bright machete cutting its way through patches of clouds"
- In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, Page 89.
"Her kimono was a brocade in shades of brown and gold. Below her waist, deer in their rich brown coloring of autumn nuzzled one another, with golds and rust behind them in a patter like fallen leaves on a forest floor."
-Arthur Golden, "Memoirs of a Geisha"
"Perfect beauty is a strong expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it: as sweet features as ever the temperate clime of Albion moulded; as pure hues of rose and lily as ever as her humid gales and vapoury skiesgenerated and screened, justified, in this instance, the term."
(Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, page 369)
"At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows."
(Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, page 125)
"At the beds, the four hunched bodachs might have been priests of a diabolic religion, Aztecs at the altar of human sacrifice, as their hands moved sinuously and ceaselessly in ritualistic pantomime over the sleeping girls."
Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas,177
"I open my eyes again and i know what i have to do. I look around, my heart a jackhammer in my chesst, blood thickening in my eyes."(Khaled Hossein's The Kite Runner, page 345)
He wasn't infatuated with her, but instead he loved her so quietly that he thought he would soon forget her, although when he considered the prospect of forgetting her his love for her grew, and this made him remember that heavy blizzards start as gentle and persistent snow.
A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin, page 158
"I can hear music leaking out of the bar. The abandoned ghost train track looms over the street in the sodium vapor glare and as I open the door someone starts to blow a trumpet and hot jazz smacks me in the chest. I walk into it like a drowning man, which is what I have come here to be."
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger pg. 119
"And the uncertainty of our futures is nothing more than the fog of breath on a windowpane." Pg. 401
-A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
"Time passes by and the pain beings to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth."
-The time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, Pg. 402
"The woman left, a pigeon in search of further seeds of conflict."
Robert Ludlum-The Bourne Identity-pg.35
"I can see the hole like it was yesterday and it was. Life is a perpetual yesterday for us."
The Lovely Bones
By: Alice Sebold
pg.137
"No girls escape the hurricane. The winds are simply too overpowering. Fortunately no storm lasts forever. By late high school the winds of the hurricane are dying down and trees begin to right themselves. Girls calm down. Their thinking is more mature and their feelings more subtle. Their friends have become kinder and more dependable. They make peace with their parents. Their judgment has improved and they are less self-absorbed. The resisters and fighters survive. When it's storming, it feels like the storm will never end, but the hurricane does end and the sun comes out again."
(Mary Phipher's Reviving Ophelia page 281)
"[The Taliban is] a nasty germ, a dangerously virulent microbe that propagates by spreading a serious disease insidiously fatal to the freedom of women."
[Latifa My Forbidden Face Pg. 40]
"The letter sang with phrases that I swear lifted me like a tonic: '"Life is a thornbush from which roses spring; all the hearts in Texas are wishing for you..."
(Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, page 61)
"As a child it seemed to me as if the ocean had caught a terrible cold, because it was always wheezing and there would be spells where it would let out a huge sneeze..." (Golden, 8)
Memoirs of a Geisha
"We're all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they'd like to be seen."
(Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, page 305)
"From above, Assef's screams went on and on, the cries of a wounded animal." (Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 291)
"You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down." (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, page 323)
"And while she slept I read by the window or watched her bed until it was an ocean and the blankets were waves I had never seen except in my head. And I thought of how far I am from the water rolling but I am here with an old women breathing at the same time with her."
Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons, p. 79
"I repeated his name because it took the place of prayer. Anatole's name anchored me to the earth, the water, the skin that held me in like a jar of water. I was a ghost in a jar."
(Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible page 311)
"The fight with Father to break away from home, the fight in the cafeteria for a piece of meat-when I went through those experiences I thought them privations and losses; now I saw them treasure chests of insight. What countless riches lay buried under the ground of those early years that I had thought so black, so barren, so thwarted with want!" (Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers pg 223)
" You are in a boat that is being tossed around by the winds of the world. The voices of your parents, you teachers, your friends and the media can blow you east, then west, then back again. To stay on course you must follow your own North Star, your sense of who you truly are."
- Reviving Ophelia
Mary Pipher (page 254)
"On ocassion the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance."(The Things They Carried pg. 32)
"striding up the side aisle directly towards him came adark monster of a man. Even in the glow of the fire, his eyes burned black."(Angels and Demons Pg. 257
"The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth." (Steve Martin The Pleasure of my Company, page 24)
"A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one's early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry; and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this times I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me being effectively awake."(Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, page 60)
"They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread."( Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, page 209)
"It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting." (Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner, page 371)
As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. (Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, page 14)
"I was surprised that it had taked so long for Patty Bancroft to come looking for me. I had become her bad child, her prodigal daughter, the kind of person, like Maeve Banning at Queen of Peace, who always wound up in the principal's office, in the hot seat." (Black and Blue 205)
"The rain was the war and you had to fight it." (Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, page 163)
The Sweet Far Thing(pg.16-17)
Perhaps this is why Cecily,Martha, and Elizabeth loathe me so and only tolerate my presence when Felicity is around. For my part, I find their minds to be as corseted as their waists, with conversations limited to parties, dressed and the misfortunes or shortcomings of others. I should rather take my chances with the lions of Rome's ancient Colosseum than endure another tea chat with the likes of them. At least the lions are honest about their desire to eat you and make no effort to hide it.
"I am a lone knight, surrounded by unworthy souls." (Da Vinci Code 455)
"Bobby, one black apostrophe of hair over his forehead, saying, "Hey Fran Flynn. I guess if everyone likes you I might like you too."" Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen page 96
The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien
"Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something."
My mother's eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had.
Page 43- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
"But Mademoiselle, you are the bright center of our system. How may the sun, around which we all revolve, leave its planets spinning?"
from octavian nothing by M.T. Anderson pg. 34
"We never went to church," I explained, "even though my mother always thought we should, and she was always feeling guilty about it. But my dad loved to cook big breakfasts on Sunday. He said that was his form of worship, and the kitchen was his church, his offering eggs and bacon and biscuits and..."
Sarah Dessen- the truth about forever
pg. 212
Sometimes, Soraya sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (page 189)
A nasty germ, a dangerously virulent microbe that propagates by spreading a serious disease insidiously fatal to the freedom of women. This microbe is highly infectious. The Taliban...
Latifa- My Forbidden Face
pg. 40
Bourne. Jason Bourne. The totally unknown man, a name buried for over a decade, a piece of human debris left in a jungle.
The Bourne Identity, page 485
"He had met another who thrilled to the same fantasies of mindless slaughter, and together they had grown into a beast with two faces, two hatefule hearts, and four busy hands to do the devil's work."
Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas, 227
"The nuts and bolts of raising us was left to Mommy, who acted as chief surgeon for bruises ("Put iodine on it"),war secretary ("If somebody hits you,take your fist and crack 'em"),religious consultant ("Put God first"), chief psychologist ("Don't think about it"),and financial adviser ("What's money if your mind is empty?")." The Color of Water by James McBride pg. 9
"Now that armies of black clouds had stormed the entire sky, his room was a sooty-smelling pit brightened only fitfully by nature's war light, filled with a rapid patter that brought to mind an image of a horde of running rats."
Dean Koontz, Forever Odd, 246
"Then I can carry on undisturbed with my work on the secret plan. I'm going to dive down into the major's unconscious. That's where I'll be until we meet again."
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
(pg.446)
"And after last evening, with my canny near-seduction of his girlfriend, I felt I was Bugs Bunny and Mercury to his Elmer Fudd and Thor." (The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin, page 42)
"Dad's voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life"
Ray Bradbury- Something Wicked This Way Comes- pg.37
" The wind came back with fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if he meant to measure their puny might against his. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching god." (Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God.)
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
from life of pi pg 6
"If it wasn't him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face.
Truman Capote-In Cold Blood-pg.69
"I am at the bottom of a well. The walls are damp and slimy. My fingers slip on the mossy stones. Sometimes i think i will never be able to pull myself out of this dark place."
Shades of Simon Gray
Joyce McDonald
Pg. 173
They were dolls, with no thoughts, or opinions, or voices of their own.
From "Speak" by Laurie H. Anderson
page 154.
"All night the cicades and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin look like beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass of water I held to her crusted lips."
(page 335)
The Time Travelor's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
"Augusta had run the whole way to Bainbridge Memorial (Hospital) clutching hope to her chest, a package that grew heavier and more unwieldly witht every step."
(Jodi Picoult's The Pact, p. 14).
Talons with bright red fingernail polish latched onto my parka. (Peak p.89)
"The rides were best viewed in the dark, an escapade in gaily lit rust, powered by unmuffled tractor engines that competed with the wavering carnival music which squawked loudly from somewhere in the middle of it all." (Frank Peretti, This Present Darkness, p. 9)
Isabella says that if she had been born a cute little antolope and saw the cheetah coming she would just kick another cute little antolope in the shins so it couldn't run very fast, and the cheetah would get it instead of her.
-Dear Dumb Diary #5
"Cody's a head case," Tiki complained. "He thinks he's all that and a bag of chips."
-Go Long
But they are newborns.
-Eclipse
Cody had several family members who were known athletes, and he's always bragging about them. "That's right, from now on I am the straw that stirs the drink...in the Eagle's nest, I am Big Bird."
-Go Long
I thought of my mother and father in one such photo, sitting in the sand on a beach at Lake Erie. It was taken before they wer married, when I imagine the word husband on my mother's tonge still had the tang of a rare, exotic fruit.
-The Book of Illumination
The interior me- the one that flies - slips back inside its shell, a turtle returning home.
-Glass
All the world's a stage, even the living room.
-Sister's Club
"The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and make its steady dash homeward, to the ocean. The sun was sinking fast, and a laundry line full of cirrus clouds stretched along the western sky like boas of white linen, then surrendered to a shiver of gold that haloed my father's head." (Pat Conroy, South of Broad, p. 80)
"Like two giants they crashed against each other. They rose high in the air, bending first one way and then the other. There was a roar as if great spears were breaking in battle and in the red light of the sun the spray that flew around them looked like blood.
Slowly the second wave forced the first one backward, rolled slowly over it, and then as the victor drags the vanquished, moved in toward the island.
The wave struck the cliff. It sent long tongues streaming around me so that I could neither see nor hear. The tongues of water licked into all the crevices, dragged at my hand and at my bare feet gripping the ledge. They rose high above me on the face of the rock, up and up, and then spent themselves against the sky and fell back, hissing past me to join the water rushing on toward the cove."
Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Ch. 27
"...her hair was a bundle of braided cotton candy on top of her head..." p.34 Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff
"He ... saw the gunpowder of Steve's beard still in the sink." --Adam Foulds from a short story entitled "The Rules are the Rules"
"The night was clear. My ceiling was sky and an eyelash of a moon."
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, p. 93
Post a Comment