Abbott Quotes

There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

If you love someone, why would you want that person to change?

Never let a boy know you’re crazy about him. He’ll lose interest, and then you’ll be a loser.

I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish - and that is the belief that moves mountains.

...learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy..

Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

Upward, not Northward

I'm not trouble at all. I'm just a guy trying to get a girl to give him the time of day. I'm like every song on the radio.

This whole conversation was turning into a twisted version of Abbot & Costello's Who's on First.

Love is like a unique comet that appears rarely in the sky shines as bright as a thousand stars and flies through your galaxy creating light during an eclipse.

Is it snowing where you are? All the world that I see from my tower is draped in white and the flakes are coming down as big as pop-corns. It's late afternoon - the sun is just setting (a cold yellow colour) behind some colder violet hills, and I am up in my window seat using the last light to write to you.

Does that mean it's not no? Is that another yes? Now I'm confused. "No?" I ask "No" he says in Eridian. "So, 'yes'?" "No, yes." "Yes?" "No. No." "Yes, yes?" "No!" he balls a fist at me, clearly frustrated. Enough of this interspecies Abbott and Costello routine.

Success comes in many different shapes and colors. Don't let other people define those shapes and colors.

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.

People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.

The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.

Now you should be thinking about me fucking you," he hissed. "Because I sure as hell am." "Oh God," Kelly breathed. "No, you don't say his name when I fuck you. You say mine.

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

The quiet but inexorable breaking down of self-esteem is much more sinister - it’s violation of the soul.

Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines. That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.

We were doomed from the start. A lost cause. A losing battle. And yet, in that narrow instant, I didn't give a single fuck.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

Did you ever stop to think that even if I am a monster, I might be your soulmate anyway?

She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.

You shot me, Zane.” “Baby, if I’d shot you, you wouldn’t be alive complaining about it,” Zane said, then leaned sideways to check the backyard. “Well, someone shot me. It’s upsetting.” Zane glared at him before rolling his eyes. “Kelly had the beanbags, you can talk to him about it later.” “It’s very upsetting,” Ty repeated, pressing his hand to his chest.

I have another friend who gets what I’m really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours anymore but herself.

I really hope he shapes up, you know? He’s got a good head on his shoulders when he’s not trying to give himself alcohol poisoning.

I ate breakfast in the kitchen by candle-light, and then drove the five miles to the station through the most glorious October colouring. The sun came up on the way, and the swamp maples and dogwood glowed crimson and orange and the stone walls and cornfields sparkled with hoar frost; the air was keen and clear and full of promise. I knew something was going to happen.

Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.

David,you’re my true love, why did we wait so long to get together? I don’t care what the world says. Let’s defy them all, my darling. - Maddy

Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.

we're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

Because there's a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there's no end to the ways love can.

I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.

She hadn't learned, no one had taught her ... that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they're not what you thought they'd be. But you'd still do anything to keep them. Because you'd wanted them for so long.

Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.

No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

I think she might cry. In her way, she is.

Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

I went to bed last night utterly dejected; I thought I was never going to amount to anything, and that you had thrown away your money for nothing. But what do you think? I woke up this morning with a beautiful new plot in my head, and I've been going about all day planning my characters, just as happy as I could be. No one can ever accuse me of being a pessimist! If I had a husband and twelve children swallowed by an earthquake one day, I'd bob up smilingly the next morning and commence to look for another set. ~Jershua Abbott

I'm staking out the bathroom to see if I can pick up chicks," he told her. "See? It worked.

Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.

What fools the public were! They were exactly like sheep…thought Mr. Abbott sleepily…following each other’s lead, neglecting one book and buying another just because other people were buying it, although, for the life of you, you couldn’t see what the one lacked and the other possessed.

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn’t there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested,

Photography helps people to see.

Doubtless, the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater Number require that it shall be hard.

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.

Perhaps you expected to feel great as soon as you escaped your abuser, and maybe you did feel a great sense of relief for a while. However, as time has passed, you may be dismayed by the extent of your emotional pain.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.

Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste basket. I can see myself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes this, what would be the judgment of a critical public?

I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be for ever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant...I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it.

Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

Doubtless we cannot see that other higher Spaceland now, because we have no eye in our stomachs.

A radio was playing quietly. Nobody was listening. It was there to drown out the silence.

Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?

Attend to your Configuration.

I have an evening dress, pink mull over silk (I'm perfectly beautiful in that), and a blue church dress, and a dinner dress of red veiling with Oriental trimming (makes me look like a Gipsy), and another of rose-coloured challis, and a grey street suit, and an every-day dress for classes. That wouldn't be an awfully big wardrobe for Julia Rutledge Pendleton, perhaps, but for Jerusha Abbott - Oh, my!

There wasn't much to know. Now there's less.

The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.

If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.

She searched her mind for a single day when it had felt good to be alive. There must have been one, surely?

What do you think is my favourite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. "Wuthering Heights." Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth churchyard. She had never known any men in her life; how could she imagine a man like Heathcliff? I couldn't do it, and I'm quite young and never outside the John Grier Asylum - I've had every chance in the world. Sometimes a dreadful fear comes over me that I'm not a genius. Will you be awfully disappointed, Daddy, if I don't turn out to be a great author?

I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love—" "—I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly. "But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever.

A pastor who counsels an abuse victim to: - Submit to her husband - Pray harder, or - Be a better wife can't help her. She should not feel guilty about looking elsewhere for help.

I love you, Nick,” Kelly whispered. “No matter what those words meant before, we know what they mean now. They’re ours now. Just ours.

The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.

It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.

But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.

The fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.

I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human"--as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.

It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!

All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

Look, I love you." Kelly told him. "You love me. We've bled for each other. Why can't that turn into more?

Oh Jesus, Digger on a horse,” Kelly said. “He kept threatening to make his horse into stew.” “He named his horse Stu,” Nick added.

Leaving - and healing from - an abusive relationship is extremely stressful. Your body may show the signs of the stress. While dealing with your emotions may make sense to you, you may neglect your physical health, not realizing how much your physical health affects your emotional and spiritual health.

Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales. You’re really just trying to get your heart to slow “down. You think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly. After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it’s just you there, and you look like no one you’ve ever seen before. You don’t look like anybody at all.

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I’d only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.

I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an "engaged" on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book isn't enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and "Vanity Fair" and Kipling's "Plain Tales" and - don't laugh - "Little Women." I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on "Little Women." I haven't told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is talking about!

Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever

And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered!

This is an extra letter in the middle of the month because I'm rather lonely tonight. It's awfully stormy; the snow is beating against my tower. All the lights are out on the campus, but I drank black coffee and I can't go to sleep. I had a supper party this evening consisting of Sallie and Julia and Leonora Fenton - and sardines and toasted muffins and salad and fudge and coffee. Julia said she'd had a good time, but Sallie stayed to help wash the dishes.

I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through. Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world. I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand. And my thunderbolt hit.

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted[9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish.

Ty plopped down in the seat next to Kelly and peered over at his friends. “What the hell happened to you two this morning?” Nick began to snicker and Kelly rolled his eyes as he took a sip of coffee. “I fell out of the bed.” “Fell?” Zane asked. “Or you were pushed?” “Legit fell. Rolled right out of that thing and took the covers with me. I dreamt I was being attacked by a giant squid and woke up thinking I was drowning.” “I woke up cold and very confused,” Nick added.

Kelly glanced at the freezer as they headed for the steps. “Hey, maybe one of them will donate a liver to your dad.” Nick looked over his shoulder at Kelly, his eyes wide. “I’m just saying. Three perfectly good livers sitting in there,” Kelly said, completely deadpan. “Nobody’s using them. I’ll go get one for you.” Nick gaped at him. “How the hell did you ever pass your psych evals?” “I cheated off your papers.” Nick rolled his eyes and started up the stairs. “The Navy gives bubble tests. When in doubt, go with C.” “Kelly.” “Get it? Navy? The sea?” “Kels, shut up.” “Oh, come on! You love puns.” Nick laughed, unable to stop himself.

In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points? In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points? In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points? And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points? Behold the infallible confirmation of the Series, 2, 4, 8, 16: is not this a Geometrical Progression? Is not this - if I might qupte my Lord's own words - "Strictly according to Analogy"? Again, was I not taught by my Lord that as in a Line there are two bonding points, and in a Square there are four bounding Lines, so in a Cube there must be six bounding Squares? Behold once more the confirming Series: 2, 4, 6: is not this an Arithmetical Progression? And consequently does it not of necessity follow that the more divine offspring of the divine Cube in the Land of Four Dimensions, must have eight bounding Cubes: and is not this also, as my Lord has taught me to believe, "strictly according to analogy"?

Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound. And it happens just like that. A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside. And I'm her. And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me. And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette-- --that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe:" but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things. In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines; and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate.

The little Hexagon meditated on this a while and then said to me; "But you have been teaching me to raise numbers to the third power: I suppose three-to-the-third must mean something in Geometry; what does it mean?" "Nothing at all," replied I, "not at least in Geometry; for Geometry has only Two Dimensions." And then I began to shew the boy how a Point by moving through a length of three inches makes a Line of three inches, which may be represented by three; and how a Line of three inches, moving parallel to itself through a length of three inches, makes a Square of three inches every way, which may be represented by three-to-the-second. xxx Upon this, my Grandson, again returning to his former suggestion, took me up rather suddenly and exclaimed, "Well, then, if a Point by moving three inches, makes a Line of three inches represented by three; and if a straight Line of three inches, moving parallel to itself, makes a Square of three inches every way, represented by three-to-the-second; it must be that a Square of three inches every way, moving somehow parallel to itself (but I don't see how) must make Something else (but I don't see what) of three inches every way—and this must be represented by three-to-the-third." "Go to bed," said I, a little ruffled by this interruption: "if you would talk less nonsense, you would remember more sense.