Alice Ball Quotes

I felt my hand curl into a fist. Felt my elbow draw back. Felt my arm dart forward, my knuckles crack into Cole's jaw. I couldn't stop myself. His head whipped to the side, and blood leaked from a cut in his lip. Behind me, gasps of shock abounded. "I'm recovered," I said. "Believe me now?" Those violet eyes slitted when they found me. "Assault and battery is illegal." "So have me arrested." He closed what little distance there was between us. Suddenly I could feel his warmth of his breath caressing my skin. "How about I put you over my lap and spank you instead?" "How about I knee your balls into your throat?" "If you're going to play with that particular area, I'd rather you use your hands." "My hands aren't going near that area ever again." A pause. Then, "I bet I could change your mind," he whispered huskily. "I bet I could bash yours." I drew back another fist, but he was ready and caught me midswing. His pupils dilated, a sign of arousal. Another sign: he began to pant. He was acting like I'd tried to unbuckle his jeans rather than smack fire out of him. "Hit me again," he said, still using the same whispered tone, "and I'll take it as an invitation." I was just as bad. I trembled with longing I couldn't control and struggled to catch my breath. "An invitation to do what?" His grip loosened, his fingers rubbing my skin. A caress, not a warning. "I guess we'll find out together.

At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory — if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can’t understand or explain.

Adults, Alice reflected, could learn something from the way children bounced back from horror like little rubber balls.

She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.

f you love science and equality but hate leprosy (and who doesn’t?), Alice Ball is 100 percent your kind of gal.

Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 2006; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose--oh, what a wailing!--and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and the shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists' Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at a fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curioser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

It wasn't sweet and tentative, it was pure carnal frustration spiked with incomprehensible lust and rolled into a giant ball of please-god-let-me-live-in-this-man's-mouth-for-the-foreseeable-future.

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

For the company to assemble at a late hour and engage in unusual, exciting and severe exercise throughout the entire night, is often too great a tax upon the physical system. To dress too thinly, and in a state of perspiration to be exposed, as ladies at the ball frequently are, to draughts of cold, is oftentimes to plant the seeds of a disease from which they never recover. Again, to come in contact, as ladies are liable to, more especially at the public ball, with disreputable men, is sometimes to form alliances that will make a lifetime of sorrow.' —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball, 1883

Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.” And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about—whenever the wind blows—oh, that’s very pretty!’ cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. ‘And I do so wish it was true! I’m sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.

But alas, I'd have to find a way to be opinionated without being too opinionated, authoritative without being a bitch about it, smart without being elitist, fair without being a pushover. If the boyfriends of my youth found me too authoritative when I should have been cheering on the sidelines as they kicked and tossed and smacked balls toward the vanguard, the male colleagues of my adulthood kept reminding me of my lack of authority as they unconsciously displayed theirs. I was always failing someone's standards of legitimacy, as a girlfriend, as a producer of opinions. It was an eternal no-win. I was always too big or too small, like Alice, and forever being told, in one way or another, 'Eat me.

Then he wipes the imaginary ball blood over my shirt. It’s much more gruesome than his bee miming.

It probably hurt. Like this.” Alice shot him. I think she was aiming for his balls, but she hit him in the stomach instead.

The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure—even at a time of the month when this could not be true—that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice—he read the Scriptures every morning—and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.

But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.

As she drove away she thought about the flowers she'd sketched for him. Billy buttons. She'd drawn one after the other, bright balls of yellow on skinny stems, over and over again, covering the paper, except for the far right corner where she'd written their meaning. My gratitude.

Alice, you might be the product of the biggest ball of ignorance, confidence, and good fortune the universe has ever manufactured. But if you’re thinking that you can take your results at the virtual tables and your grand tactic of Ignorance Is Bliss, and make that work for the Main Event, forget it—it WON'T.

Here are three things I know for sure: 1. When I was born, someone- I like to think it was my mother- wrapped me in a blue ball gown. 2. There is a color in this world that was named after a king's daughter, who always wore gowns that were made of exactly the same shade of blue. The stories about her make me wish sometimes I could have been friends with her; she smoked in public (at a time when women didn't), once jumped fully clothed into a swimming pool with the captain of a ship, often wore a boa constrictor around her neck, and another time shot at telegraph poles from a moving train. 3. My favorite story goes like this: once, on an island not far from here, there was a queen who climbed a tree waiting for her husband to return from a battle. She tied herself to a branch and vowed to remain there until he returned. She waited for so long that she slowly transformed into an orchid, which was an exact replica of the pattern on the blue gown she was wearing. Here's one more thing that I know for sure is true. On the day June told us she was going to hospital to bring you home, I was in the workshop pressing blue lady orchids. I've always loved them best because their centres are my favorite color: the color of the gown I was once wrapped in. The color of a king's wayward daughter favored. A color called Alice blue.

Imagine the martyrdom of a pun which has become an integral portion of one's organism to be lugged through life like the convict's ball and chain. Do you suppose he vainly tries to escape it, or is he passive in its clutches or can it be possible that some memory of the joy still survives which irradiated his being, the first time he heard it from his lips in the springtime of his practice?

Take Action If You’re Ruminating Because of Avoidance Coping If you’re ruminating because you’ve been putting off dealing with an issue, taking any level of action to address what you’ve been avoiding will usually help alleviate your rumination. Most of the time, you won’t need to completely resolve the issue to lift your rumination—for example, you might just send an email or make a phone call to get the ball rolling.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.

COOKBOOK FOR THE MODERN HOUSEWIFE The cover was red with a subtle crosshatch pattern and distressed, the book's title stamped in black ink- all of it faded with age. Bordering the cookbook's cover were hints of what could be found inside. Alice tilted her head as she read across, down, across, and up the cover's edges. Rolls. Pies. Luncheon. Drinks. Jams. Jellies. Poultry. Soup. Pickles. 725 Tested Recipes. Resting the spine on her bent knees, the cookbook dense yet fragile in her hands, Alice opened it carefully. There was an inscription on the inside cover. Elsie Swann, 1940. Going through the first few, age-yellowed pages, Alice glanced at charts for what constituted a balanced diet in those days: milk products, citrus fruits, green and yellow vegetables, breads and cereals, meat and eggs, the addition of a fish liver oil, particularly for children. Across from it, a page of tips for housewives to avoid being overwhelmed and advice for hosting successful dinner parties. Opening to a page near the back, Alice found another chart, this one titled Standard Retail Beef Cutting Chart, a picture of a cow divided by type of meat, mini drawings of everything from a porterhouse-steak cut to the disgusting-sounding "rolled neck." Through the middle were recipes for Pork Pie, Jellied Tongue, Meat Loaf with Oatmeal, and something called Porcupines- ground beef and rice balls, simmered for an hour in tomato soup and definitely something Alice never wanted to try- and plenty of notes written in faded cursive beside some of the recipes. Comments like Eleanor's 13th birthday-delicious! and Good for digestion and Add extra butter. Whoever this Elsie Swann was, she had clearly used the cookbook regularly. The pages were polka-dotted in brown splatters and drips, evidence it had not sat forgotten on a shelf the way cookbooks would in Alice's kitchen.

Now, do you want a poppy?” “A poppy? Whatever for?” “I’ve noticed it on your cards. Is it important?” “Oh, the poppy. It’s quite a mixed symbol---a symbol of silence, you see. How strange. And yes, it is the symbol for the ball motif. It seems that women have grown tired of the silent, subservient role. So, they have taken that very symbol to flaunt the reversal of roles for this event.” “Would you like to flaunt it?” Constance froze for a moment. “I think not, Alice. I am choosing to remain silent, incognito. I don't wish to call attention to myself.” She waited while Alice seemed to puzzle over her answer. “Perhaps all the more reason,” Alice said. “Your silence is chosen, not imposed.” “But it would draw such attention. A bright red poppy?” “Perhaps not. What if it were not bright red?” “Not red?” “There is a white poppy, with an almost black center. I noticed some once in the window of a florist in Chicago. I was mesmerized. I turned around and went in to see them. The florist was a bit outdone with me that I did not buy even one.” Alice laughed. “But it could have all sorts of meanings for you.” “Yes, and what would those be?” “You’ve already explained why the ladies chose it for their motif. But the white poppy with the black center would be even more meaningful. All the things you’ve said---I believe I remember this correctly---plus peace.

Elliot - Elliot waved absently, making a decision right then and there. He'd take the trip that Patrick offered. A cruise down Europe's most famous rivers couldn't be any more disruptive than home, after all. Alice -I stood up shaking the laptop at nothing. "He made me think we were going to get married at the end of this trip! He had me look up the laws for Americans getting married in Budapest!" "Ball-hanging is too good for him. He serves something worse. Off with his head!" "I will take that trip!" I yelled at the small living room filled with boxes that I had yet to unpack. "And I will enjoy myself! A lot!

Non è vero che i bei ricordi consolano, anzi. Non sono un caldo rifugio durante le avversità, balle. I bei ricordi tormentano, perchè non torneranno.

Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn’t always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.

For all of her twenties and thirties, Alice had believed that she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways.

afraid that Ben will go into shock when he realizes she has a zillion and one bad habits; it won’t take long before he notices that she never rinses out her cereal bowls or bothers to make the bed. Sooner or later he’ll discover that the ice cream is always disappearing from the freezer because Gillian is feeding it to Buddy as a special treat. He’ll see that Gillian’s sweaters often are crumpled into balls of wool and chenille on the floor of a closet or under the bed. And if Ben grows disgusted, if he should decide to kick her out, say good-bye, rethink his options, well, then let him. There’s no marriage license

away. “We both know he hasn’t got the skills to make a wand, never mind the funds.” Wands were ridiculously expensive, the small pointy wood able to concentrate a spell a lot easier for the caster, resulting in fewer accidents. “He even told everyone how he is going to be given a special recognition for it from the Magicka!” Rose continued with a snort. “Yeah, maybe recognition for the worst witch in town. He has one of the worst track records in Paladin history.” “Yeah, you’re right.” Alice said, not quite believing it herself. “Come on blondie.” Rose put her arm around her again. “Let’s get you to your meeting. Don’t want you to piss off Grayson any more than he already is.” “I’m sure I can manage it.” Adjusting her neatly pressed collar, Alice stared at the clock on her grey cubicle wall, it was one of those Chinese novelty cats that every minute or so looked in the other direction. The realisation that something could go very wrong in the meeting was dawning on her. Not once in the last five years working under Dread had she been called into an official disciplinary meeting. Yes, she had had more than one warning over the years, but nothing as official as an actual meeting. The cat’s eyes moved to the left, its tail swinging beneath it. Swatting the blue ball floating lazily around her head she continued to stare at the cat, the eyes swapping to the right once more. Stupid bloody thing. She swatted at the blue flame again,

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her. What I say about the need for faith in science is equally true for a purely causative world and for one in which probability rules. No amount of purely objective and disconnected observation can show that probability is a valid notion. To put the same statement in other language, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith. It is in this connection that I must say that Einstein's dictum concerning the directness of God is itself a statement of faith. Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

One star. Story had absolutely no depth and narrator sounded like he'd rather be kicked in the balls but he was pretty hot so I'll give him a star.

No end. No end, Alice.

I had my reasons for keeping my mouth shut.” “Your wife had more balls than you did,” I said. “She’s not my wife,” Reece replied. “And don’t even get me started on this open marriage bullshit. I know you, Alice. That’s not you.” “You used to know me,” I told him. “But not anymore. I’ve changed.” “Not that much.” Reece shook his head. “No fucking way.” “Are you here to judge me or fix the damn car?

Mary had known what to do. She and Debbie had worked everything out in advance—whom to call and in what order: the funeral parlor, the credit card companies, the friends. There was already an obituary ready to go. Leonard’s photo would be in all the newspapers, on Twitter. It’d be in the black-and-white photo montage at the Oscars, with someone singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in a ball gown. Alice made some of the calls to friends—she and Debbie split up the list. No one was surprised. Everyone was kind. Alice cried during the first few, nearly unable to get the words out, but then she got used to the rhythm of the conversation and found that she was able to make it through. That lasted a few minutes and then she was crying again. Alice hugged Mary longer than she’d ever hugged a relative stranger in her life. This was how people felt about their midwives, or platoon mates, or fellow hostages—they had seen things together that no one else would ever fully understand.

This was my day for thinking of things too late. I wasn’t much for reading though.

Kept it to make a glow.

page. I knew Alice was a sly one right from the start, Marigold had written rather unkindly. It looks as though she will be the first of us to get married – bags I be her bridesmaid – though I don’t know whether Tom’s actually popped the question yet. Did you think I was head over heels in love with him, like you? Because if so . . . Damn her eyes, Maddy thought furiously. How dare she insinuate I was ever in love with Tom Browning, or anyone else for that matter! Oh, how typical of Marigold to assume that everyone else feels just as she does. I could wring her neck! She screwed the letter up into a ball and guessed she was probably red in the face from sheer indignation, for half the occupants of the cookhouse were staring at her and the other half regarding her screwed-up letter with more than usual interest. She told herself not to be an idiot and carefully unravelled the crumpled pages, quickly scanning the rest of the unread sheet. Nothing of interest here, except that Marigold asked if Maddy knew that

You have to come downstairs now!" panted Alice. "What's wrong?" "Everything! Izzy's floating, Melanie ran into the wall, my hand made a silver ball and Colleen smashed my keys though the wall!" Alice huffed. "Wait, what? Slow down, I didn't catch a word you said," said Jenn. "Come on!

Alice twists a lock of her hair as she sucks on her straw and swivels back and forth on her seat. The shush of the ball bearings sounds like the sea to her, like waves retreating through the sand. She is a thousand miles away. I know this, but I'm not going to let her know I know.

Instantly two of the girls seized her and, as she involuntarily opened her lips to scream, one thrust a ball of clean rags into her mouth, thrusting it in so far that it effectually gagged her, nor could she expel the ball from her mouth.

The time of the lone wolf, Capitalism, for instance, is indeed over. It cannot possibly sustain itself without gobbling up the world. That is what we see all around us. Women and children in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, Haiti, Mexico, China and elsewhere in the world forced into starvation and slavery as they turn out the tennis balls and cheap sneakers for the affluent. Ancient trees leveled to make more housing while housing that could be saved and reused is torn down and communities heartlessly displaced. Mining of the earth for every saleable substance she has. Fouling of the waters that is her blood. Murdering innocents, whether people, animals or plants, in pursuit of oil. The lone wolf is the hungry ghost (in Buddhist thought) that can never get enough; whose mouth may be small but whose stomach is boundless. We cannot afford him.

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Alice never saw the White Rabbit and followed him into Wonderland? If Cinderella never found the courage to walk into that ball all alone and dance with Prince Charming? If Ariel hadn’t gone to the surface and saved Prince Eric from drowning, even though everyone warned her about humans? One moment. One decision. One life forever changed because they opted for one path over another. It’s remarkable to think our choices have this much power, this much ability to alter the course our lives had been on.

I’m not sure what you want me to think of you, Rafe.” “I’m pretty sure I just want you to think of me, Alice,” he said in a whisper as he turned and walked back to the party.

Rafe looked over at me and pulled my left hand to his lips. He kissed my empty ring finger twice and set it down. “No end, Alice.

Get to your places!' shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.