“
Every woman wants a man who'll fall in love with her soul as well as her body.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir
“
I didn't know someone could love me like this," she said. "Could love me and love me and love me without...needing space."
Lincoln wasn't asleep. He rolled on top of her.
"There's no air in space," he said.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
I wrote a thesis on love, and I wrote it in lipstick. Of course, I also got blood on the paper, because the lipstick was still attached to her cheating lips.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
That's not the point," he said. "What kind of creep would I be if I let my girl carry something heavy while I walked along, swinging my arms?"
Your girl? "The kind that respects my wishes," she said. "And my strength, and my... arms."
Levi grinned some more. Because he wasn't taking her seriously. "I have a lot of respect for your arms. I like how they're attached to the rest of you.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
“
Lincoln?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you believe in love before that?”
Her breath caught in her throat like a sore hiccup.
And then it was too much to keep trying not to kiss her.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.
”
”
Jane Austen (Emma)
“
I pictured a girl who made every moment, everything she touched, and everyone around her feel lighter and sweeter.
“I pictured you,” he said. “I just didn’t know what you looked like.
“And then, when I did know what you looked like, you looked like the girl who was all those things. You looked like the girl I loved.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
He knew why he wanted to kiss her. Because she was beautiful. And before that, because she was kind. And before that, because she was smart and funny. Because she was exactly the right kind of smart and funny. Because he could imagine taking a long trip with her without ever getting bored. Because whenever he saw something new and interesting, or new and ridiculous, he always wondered what she'd have to say about it--how many stars she'd give it and why.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
She wasn’t made to be alone.”
“I guess none of us are.”
Our eyes meet and an electric tingle runs through me.
“She missed you,” I say in a whisper.
“Did she?” His voice is a soft caress. His gaze into my eyes is so intense that I swear he sees straight into my soul.
“Yes.” Warmth flushes my cheeks. I… “She thought about you all the time.”
The candlelight flickers a soft glow along his jawline, along his lips. “I hated losing her.” His voice is a low growl. “I hadn’t realized just how attached I’d gotten.” He reaches and moves a strand of wet hair out of my face. “How dangerously addictive she could be.
”
”
Susan Ee (World After (Penryn & the End of Days, #2))
“
Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
She understood him. He could not forgive her,-but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjest resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impuse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.
”
”
Jane Austen (Persuasion)
“
I couldn't love anyone more than I do you, it would kill me. And I couldn't love anyone less because it would always feel like less. Even if I loved some other girl, that's all I would ever think about, the difference between loving her and loving you.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
”
”
Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
“
I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
”
”
Colette Gauthier-Villars (The Pure and the Impure)
“
What's possible?' she asked.
'Anything,' he said absently. 'But that’s not what I was talking about. Oh, hello, Claire. You’re in good time. I need an extra pair of hands.'
'As long as I keep them attached,' she said, which earned her a startled stare.
The things you say to me, you’d think I was some sort of monster.
”
”
Rachel Caine (Bite Club (The Morganville Vampires, #10))
“
She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.
”
”
Sharon Maas (Of Marriageable Age)
“
Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter - even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
“
Klaus had known for all twelve of his years that his older sister found a hand on her shoulder comforting - as long as the hand was attached to an arm, of course.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Austere Academy (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #5))
“
Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.
”
”
Alain de Botton (On Love)
“
Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.
”
”
Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk)
“
She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, because she could never do that - love someone completely and survive intact if her left her.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Turbulent Sea (Drake Sisters, #6))
“
As soon as a manhas his guard up. he will not fall in love or get attached the only way he'll get attached is if you lower his guard first.
”
”
Sherry Argov (Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart)
“
Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.
”
”
James Joyce (Dubliners)
“
I can see that you're in love, but only in a very narrow sense. It's the love of someone that finds charms and qualities in a woman that she doesn't actually have, who puts her in a class apart with every one else in second place, and who stays attached to her even while he's abusing her.
”
”
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses)
“
With nothing else to distract her, Celeana eventually returned to thinking about Sam. Even weeks later, she had no idea how she'd somehow gotten attached to him, what he'd been shouting when Arobynn beat her, and why Arobynn had thought he'd need three seasoned assassins to restrain him that day.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (The Assassin and the Desert (Throne of Glass, #0.3))
“
She felt Jay squeezing her hand with his. It was warm.
It made her feel safe and attached to the world.
”
”
Kimberly Derting (Desires of the Dead (The Body Finder, #2))
“
Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble, as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better than her more healthy offspring.
”
”
Charles Mackay (Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)
“
What do we say to a guest who forgets her umbrella? Do we run after her and say "What is the matter with you? Every time you come to visit you forget something. If it's not one thing it's another. Why can't you be like your sister? When she comes to visit, she knows how to behave. You're forty-four years old! Will you never learn? I'm not a slave to pick up after you! I bet you'd forget your head if it weren't attached to your shoulders." That's not what we say to a guest. We say "Here's your umbrella, Alice," without adding "scatterbrain."
Parents need to learn to respond to their children as they do to guests.
”
”
Haim G. Ginott (Between Parent and Child)
“
Feeling her strength return right along with her annoyance, Dagmar stepped back and raised her foot, slamming it down on the tip.
“Ow! Evil barbarian viper!” He rose on his hind legs, his front claws grasping his tail. “You are aware this is attached to me?”
“Yes. That’s how I knew it was taking liberties!
”
”
G.A. Aiken (What a Dragon Should Know (Dragon Kin, #3))
“
Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does.
”
”
W. Somerset Maugham
“
By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.
”
”
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
“
Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine -- If he love with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him -- Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse -- It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not?
”
”
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
“
And in the end,
she left a scar
and I knew that was
how she wanted to
be remembered.
She wanted to leave
her mark in the
world
without getting
her heart too
attached to it.
”
”
Robert M. Drake (Black Butterfly)
“
Do you believe in love at first sight?"
He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth.
"I don't know," he said. "Do you believe in love before that?
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
There's never been a moment," he barely said, "when I didn't recognize you."
She wiped her eyes. Her mascara smeared. He nudged the merry-to-round into motion. He could kiss her now. If he wanted.
"I'd know you in the dark," he said. "From a thousand miles away. There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with."
He could kiss her.
"I know you," he said.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
I met a girl in a U-Haul.
A beautiful girl
And I fell for her.
I fell hard.
Unfortunately, sometimes life gets in the way.
Life definitely got in my way.
It got all up in my damn way,
Life blocked the door with a stack of wooden 2x4's
nailed together and attached to a fifteen inch concrete wall
behind a row of solid steel bars, bolted to a titanium frame that
no matter how hard I shoved against it-
It
wouldn't
budge.
Sometimes life doesn't budge.
It just gets all up in your damn way.
It blocked my plans, my dreams, my desires, my wishes,
my wants, my needs.
It blocked out that beautiful girl
That I fell so hard for.
Life tries to tell you what's best for you
What should be most important to you
What should come in first
Or second
Or third.
I tried so hard to keep it all organized, alphabetized,
stacked in chronological order, everything in its perfect space,
its perfect place.
I thought that's what life wanted me to do.
This is what life needed for me to do.
Right?
Keep it all in sequence?
Sometimes, life gets in your way.
It gets all up in your damn way.
But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it
wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get
all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all
over and be carried along.
Life wants you to fight it.
It wants you to grab an axe and hack through the wood.
It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through
the concrete.
It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal
and steel until you can reach through and grab it.
Life wants you to grab all the organized, the
alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to
mix it all together,
stir it up,
blend it.
Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your little
brother should be the only thing that comes first.
Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your career
and your education should be the only thing that comes in
second.
And life definitely doesn't want me
To just let it tell me
that the girl I met,
The beautiful, strong, amazing, resilient girl
That I fell so hard for
Should only come in third.
Life knows.
Life is trying to tell me
That the girl I love,
The girl I fell
So hard for?
There's room for her in first.
I'm putting her first.
”
”
Colleen Hoover
“
Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it's all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there's no furniture? What if you get inside and it's just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basked of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there's nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?
What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
”
”
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
“
Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world.
She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know – we cannot know – everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that.
Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people.
This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
“
She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.
”
”
Jane Austen (Love and Freindship (and Other Early Works))
“
Her flawless pale skin was also spangled with gemstones. I don't know how they'd been attached, but they clung to her and sent little flashes of color glittering around the cavern when she moved. They were concentrated most densely around her ... well ... She'd been, ah, vajazzled.
”
”
Jim Butcher (Cold Days (The Dresden Files, #14))
“
So ... I'm larking through the Baby Gap, looking at tiny capri pants and sweaters that cost more than ... I don't know, more than they should. And I get totally sucked in by this ridiculous, tiny fur coat. The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
Just shut up and start sucking each other's faces already," Vida grumbled, leaning awkwardly against the stump. She would never admit it aloud, but I knew the burns on her back her eating her alive with pain. "I'm trying to make up for the sleep I lost when you started screeching at each other like cats in heat."
"Miss Vida," Liam said, "has anyone ever told you that you are positively the whipped cream on the sundae of life?"
She glared at him. "Anyone ever told you your head is shaped like a pencil?"
"That is physically impossible," Chubs groused. "He'd be--"
"Actually," Liam began, "Cole once did try to-- What?"
"Oh, I'm sorry," Chub said, "apparently the middle of my sentence interrupted the beginning of yours. Do continue."
"I'm going to guess you probably don't want to hear about the time he pushed my head through the neighbours fence..."
"Was there a lot of blood?" Vida asked, suddenly interested. "Did you lose an ear?"
Liam held his hands up next to his ears, indicating both were firmly attached to his skull.
"Then, no" she said. "No one wants to hear your boring-ass story.
”
”
Alexandra Bracken (Never Fade (The Darkest Minds, #2))
“
What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania.
“She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—”
“Where did she get it from?”
“Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.”
Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut.
Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.”
Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound.
He was barely breathing.
“The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so
low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a
catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her
draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in
her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure,
told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out
of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage,
to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
“
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
“
We’re attached in ways I can’t comprehend. While everyone else expects me to fuck up … she just loves me. And I’m reckless enough to let her.
She’s my softer side, and I’m her motherfucking monster.
”
”
Mary Elizabeth (Innocents (Dusty, #1))
“
If
you are nice, but you give of yourself with strings attached, the
demand for reciprocity will send him several steps backward.
”
”
Sherry Argov (Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl―A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship)
“
Scarlet cocked her head. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go? It’s going to require some precise manuvering to attach to the docking clamp, and from what Cinder told me about your flying skills…”
“What do you mean? What did Cinder say about my flying skills?”
Scarlet and Cinder shared a look. “Naturally, she told me that you’re a fantastic pilot,” said Scarlet, “Absolutely top-notch.”
“I think she was practicing her sarcasm,” said Iko.
Thorne glared, but Cinder only shrugged.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
“
Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a win attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
”
”
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
Jennifer to Beth: Ech. I don't like Tom Cruise.
Beth to Jennifer: Me neither. But I usually like Tom Cruise movies.
Jennifer to Beth: Me too... Huh, maybe I do like Tom Cruise. But I hate feeling pressured to find him attractive. I don't.
Beth to Jennifer: Nobody does. It's a lie perpetuated by the American media. Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.
Jennifer to Beth: Men don't like Julia Roberts?
Beth to Jennifer: Nope. Her teeth scare them.
Jennifer to Beth: Good to know.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice.
Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal—this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember.
“Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms.
She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn’t fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was—a hungry, tired vampire.
Well, she thought. Almost like old times. “More people to buy presents for,” she said. “Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you’ve-started-dating question.”
“What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything,” Simon said with a grin.
“Jace mostly likes weapons,” Clary sighed. “He likes books, but they have a huge library at the Institute. He likes classical music …” She brightened. Simon was a musician; even though his band was terrible, and was always changing their name—currently they were Lethal Soufflé—he did have training. “What would you give someone who likes to play the piano?”
“A piano.”
“Simon.”
“A really huge metronome that could also double as a weapon?”
Clary sighed, exasperated.
“Sheet music. Rachmaninoff is tough stuff, but he likes a challenge.”
“Now you’re talking. I’m going to see if there’s a music store around here.” Clary, done with her hot chocolate, tossed the cup into a nearby trash can and pulled her phone out. “What about you? What are you giving Isabelle?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Simon said. They had started heading toward the avenue, where a steady stream of pedestrians gawking at the windows clogged the streets.
“Oh, come on. Isabelle’s easy.”
“That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about.” Simon’s brows drew together. “I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. The relationship, I mean.”
“You really have to DTR, Simon.”
“What?”
“Define the relationship. What it is, where it’s going. Are you boyfriend and girlfriend, just having fun, ‘it’s complicated,’ or what? When’s she going to tell her parents? Are you allowed to see other people?”
Simon blanched. “What? Seriously?”
“Seriously. In the meantime—perfume!” Clary grabbed Simon by the back of his coat and hauled him into a cosmetics store that had once been a bank. It was massive on the inside, with rows of gleaming bottles everywhere. “And something unusual,” she said, heading for the fragrance area. “Isabelle isn’t going to want to smell like everyone else. She’s going to want to smell like figs, or vetiver, or—”
“Figs? Figs have a smell?” Simon looked horrified; Clary was about to laugh at him when her phone buzzed. It was her mother.
where are you? It’s an emergency.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
“
Harriet smiled. "My name is Harriet."
"Do your friends call you Harry?"
"Not if they want to remain my friends."
"Harriet it is, then, and since we have to convince everyone we're... attached, you must call me Oliver."
She tilted her head. "Do your friends call you Ollie?"
"Not if they want to remain my friends.
”
”
Jen Turano (After a Fashion (A Class of Their Own, #1))
“
I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little boy and you would ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?” Yeah. “You know how half the time you weren’t even thirsty. You just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until you fell asleep.” She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her. Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.
”
”
Dito Montiel
“
Ohmygod," Jade whispered, panicked. She grabbed my arm and yanked, almost knocking me off balance. "Something moved in those bushes."
I shoved her off, pointed to the ground, and smiled. From under the bush, long ears attached to a tiny brown speckles head peeked out. "Yeah. That bunny is a Denazen suit in disguise. Where do you suppose he's hiding his gun? Or maybe he doesn't need one. Maybe he's a martial arts master trained in the art of kickassery.
”
”
Jus Accardo (Toxic (Denazen, #2))
“
The midwest is full of these types of people. The nice enoughs but with a soul made of plastic. Easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman's entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. Her books shelves are stocked with coffee table crap The Irish in America, Mizzou Football - A History in Pictures, We Remember 911, something dumb with kittens. I knew I needed a pliant friend for my plan, someone I could load up with awful stories about Nick. Someone who would become overly attached to me. Someone who would be easy to manipulate. Who wouldn't think to hard about anything I said because she felt privileged to hear it.
”
”
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
“
It was told to me, it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects, and told me, as I thought, with triumph. This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested; and it has not been only once; I have had her hopes and exultations to listen to again and again. I have known myself to be divided from Edward forever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection. Nothing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me. I have had to content against the unkindness of his sister and the insolence of his mother, and have suffered the punishment of an attachment without enjoying its advantages. And all this has been going on at the time when, as you too well know, it has not been my only unhappiness. If you can think me capable of ever feeling, surely you may suppose that I have suffered now.
”
”
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)
“
They died together; they'll always be remembered together. It's decided, once and for all. He was hers. The rumors don't matter; they'll fade...People may remember it was suicide, but my name won't be attached. It will just be two lovers, fused together forever.
”
”
Rebecca Serle (When You Were Mine)
“
when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others’) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied.
- Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001
Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis
”
”
Kathy Steele
“
Lincoln closed his eyes. It seemed like the right thing to do, no matter what happened next. He closed his eyes and felt her fingertips touching his cheek, then his forehead, then his eyelids. He took a breath--ink and hand soap.
"I" -- he heard her whisper, closer than he expected, and shaky and strange -- "think I might be a very stupid girl."
He shook his head no. Just barely. So that only someone who was holding his cheek and his neck would notice.
"Yes," she said, sounding closer. He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. What if he opened his eyes and she saw what she was doing?
She kissed his cheek, and he let his head tip forward into her hands. She kissed his other cheek. And his chin. The groove below his bottom lip. "Stupid girl," she said near the corner of his mouth, sounding incredulous, "what could you possibly be thinking?"
Lincoln found his mouth. "Perfect girl," he said so quietly that only someone with her hands in his hair and her lips all but touching his could possibly hear. "Pretty girl." He found her mouth. "Perfect." Kiss. "Magic." Kiss. "Only girl.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
Decebel looked over at Fane. "A face tu fiecare a lua ce ei say?(Do you ever get what they say?)"
Fane smiled at his Beta. "Nu mai incerce sa, (No longer try)."
"Good call." Decebel nodded.
Jen looked over at Decebel, her eyes narrowing. "No talking in foreign tongue when around the Americans."
Decebel leaned towards her, the gleam in his eyes causing Jen to tremble. "But Jennifer, I thought you spoke Romanian." He looked around at Sally and Jacque. "Weren't you two under the impression that she spoke Romanian?"
Jacque and Sally nodded despite the daggers Jen was staring their way.
"That was thoroughly impressed upon us, wouldn't you say, Sally?" Jacque turned to look at her.
"Wait. Uh yeah, I distinctly remember a bar...vodka...and I'm almost positive Jen speaking in Romanian to the hot bartender."
Sally was grinning from ear to ear as Jen's face grew red.
"I hope you two aren't attached to your undergarments because I just got the sudden urge to have a bonfire," Jen growled out.
"Note to self: hide underwear."
"Or you could just solve that problem by not wearing any." Jacque heard Fane's voice through their bond. Her jaw dropped open and her face turned bright red as she turned to look at her mate.
Jen looked at Sally. "Looks like Fane had a suggestion about the princess' undergarments. If I had my guess, I'd say he told her I couldn't burn them if she didn't own any."
If Jacque could've turned any redder she would have. "How? What..." Jacque stuttered as she looked at her blonde friend, trying to figure out how she knew what Fane had been thinking.
"It's a gift, Watson. But really what it boils down to is when it comes to chicks and underwear, guys will always say they don't mix."
Decebel coughed as he choked on his laughter while Fane had buried his face in Jacque's back, his shoulders shaking. Jacque and Sally both looked at their friend with open mouths.
”
”
Quinn Loftis (Just One Drop (The Grey Wolves, #3))
“
Her phone lay on the table, so I picked it up, turned on the camera, made a stupid face, and snapped a picture. “What the hell are you doing?” Abby said with a giggle.
I searched for my name, and then attached the picture. “So you’ll remember how much you adore me when I call.
”
”
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
“
Kacie, get attached. Please, get attached. I sure as hell know I am. You’re what I want. You and the girls. This is it for me.” I brushed a fresh tear from her cheek. “I know we’re taking our time, especially where the girls are concerned, but you’re my more, remember?” “You’re my more too.
”
”
Beth Ehemann (Room for More (Cranberry Inn, #2))
“
Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her, which all these things made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She understood him. He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of some former sentiment, it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.
”
”
Jane Austen (Persuasion)
“
Why are they doing that?” his mother said, frowning at her grandsons. The boys were sorting the casserole into piles on their plates.
“Doing what?” Eve asked.
“Why aren’t they eating their food?”
“They don’t like it when things touch,” Eve said.
“What things?” his mother asked.
“Their food. They don’t like it when different foods touch or mix together.”
“How do you serve dinner, in ice cube trays?
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
“
How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.
”
”
Jonah Lehrer (How We Decide)
“
He took her by the hand and led her out of the control room and into a little side room. There, amid a lot of sculpting paraphernalia, was her statue. The statue from the museum. The statue of Fortuna. New and gleaming.
Rose gaped. 'But I never posed for this.'
'No need,' said the Doctor, patting it on the arm -- an arm which still had a hand attached.
'What d'you mean?'
'I mean,' he explained, 'that you won't have to pose for it. As Mickey said -' the Doctor smiled to himself - 'it was sculpted by someone who knew you pretty well.'
He ran a hand through his hair and looked as though he was expecting applause.
Rose walked round the statue. 'Is my bum really that--'
'Yes,' the Doctor interrupted testily. 'This statue is accurate in every detail. Bum. Arms. Legs. Nose. Broken fingernail on your right hand.'
* * *
Rose stood looking at the statue for a bit longer. 'It is perfect,' she said at last.
'I was inspired.'
They smiled at each other. All was right with the world again.
”
”
Jacqueline Rayner (Doctor Who: The Stone Rose)
“
I think we’re always looking for new pieces,” Viola says quietly.
What?
She continues, “I was looking for Lawrence, then for something to replace Lawrence, then for Aaron… maybe that’s the real truth about being broken. We’re always whole, we’re just looking to add on to ourselves, to be more whole. And then when a piece leaves, it’s broken away. But we aren’t left any less whole than we were to begin with…”
“But feeling broken—” I begin, the words tight in my throat. I’m grateful that Viola cuts me off.
“Is horrible. Painful,” she finishes. “But then, when you aren’t expecting it, new pieces appear and suddenly…they’re attached.” Her eyes rise to meet mine. “And you end up more whole than you were before.
”
”
Jackson Pearce (As You Wish (Genies #1))
“
If you have an anxious attachment style, you tend to get attached very quickly, even just on the basis of physical attraction. One night of sex or even just a passionate kiss and, boom, you already can't get that person out of your mind. As you know, once your attachment system is activated, you begin to crave the other person's closeness and will do anything in your power to make it work even before you really get to know him/her and decide whether you like that person or not!
”
”
Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
“
[H]is first purpose was to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen's grounds he had done it so well that Catherine did not think it could ever be repeated too often. She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own; for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine's dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.
”
”
Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
“
Frequently, when I suggest to people that they detach from a person or problem, they recoil in horror. “Oh, no!” they say. “I could never do that. I love him, or her, too much. I care too much to do that. This problem or person is too important to me. I have to stay attached!” My answer to that is, “WHO SAYS YOU HAVE TO?” I’ve got news—good news. We don’t “have to.” There’s a better way. It’s called “detachment.”3 It may be scary at first, but it will ultimately work better for everyone involved.
”
”
Melody Beattie (Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself)
“
Normally when I’m attempting a risky, clandestine, secret date and I need to escape my house undetected, I ask myself, ‘What would MacGyver do?’”
Oh, my god, this chick just mentioned MacGyver?
Hell.
Yes.
I break my eyes away from hers long enough to hide the fact that I think I just fell for her and also to assess our escape route. I glance at the swing on the porch, then look back at Six when I’m sure the cheesy grin is gone from my face.
“I think MacGyver would take your porch swing and build an invisible force field out of grass and matches. Then he would attach a jet engine to it and fly it out of here undetected. Unfortunately I’m all out of matches.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (Finding Cinderella (Hopeless, #2.5))
“
Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits 'roberts', combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr. Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs. Roberts, and in the end Mrs. Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs. Roberts, had never forgiven her.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse
“
Imagine the infant who one day cries and gets fed, and the next day cries and goes hungry. One day smiles and is kissed and hugged. The next day smiles and is ignored. This is what psychologists called 'preoccupied or unresolved attachment' with the primary caregiver--usually the mother. There was love one minute and disdain the next. Affection that was given in abundance for no reason and then taken away without cause. The child has no ability to predict or influence the behavior of the parent. The narcissist loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. So she will tend to the child only when it makes her feel good.
”
”
Wendy Walker (Emma in the Night)
“
Did you blame the men who fired the guns, the men who built the guns, or the men who invented the guys? Did you blame the men who had put those particular guns in the hands attached to those particular trigger fingers? When Nick's plane crashed into the ocean off Honduras at a speed which turned the ocean to unyielding stone, was it Western Mountain's fault, for sending him out?Nick's, for going? Anne's, for letting him? Did you blame the human beings who had made such a world possible, or the world that had made such human beings possible?
The answer, she thought, lying now in her missing daughter's bed (Was it Miranda, for pushing a limit any time she saw one? Anne again, for uprooting her so callously, for failing in some way to adequately console her after her father's death?), was that you had two choices: you could blame everybody, or you could blame nobody.
”
”
Kelly Braffet (Last Seen Leaving)
“
However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.
”
”
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
“
My studies have shown that the process of falling into mature love happens in four steps. When you meet a woman, you subconsciously look for cues that she's the kind os person you should be with. That's assumption. If she passes the assumption test, you begin to get to know her to find out if she's appropriate for you. If she is, you're attracted. If, as you get to know her, the attraction is reinforced with joy or pain or both, you'll fall into infatuation. And if you manage to make a connection and attach to each other during infatuation, you'll move into mature, unconditional love.
”
”
Jennifer Crusie (Bet Me)
“
If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
Two words would comprehend my future—death and hell: existence, after losing her, would be hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton’s attachment more than mine. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him. Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not?
”
”
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
“
In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.
”
”
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
“
Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.
We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?
”
”
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
“
Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.
Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry
eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math.
”
”
Jeffrey McDaniel
“
A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.
”
”
Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric)
“
The most important thing is love," said Leigh-Cheri. "I know that now. There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon."
Leigh-Cheri sent that message to Bernard through his attorney. The message continued, "I'm not quite 20, but, thanks to you, I've learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?"
The next day, Bernard's attorney delivered to her this reply:
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.
Leigh-Cheri went out in the blackberries and wept. "I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed.
Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
“
The articles were extremely eye-opening. Not just in Teen Vogue but in Seventeen and CosmoGirl as well. They were all about being yourself, staying natural, loving your body as is, and going green! The messages were the exact opposite of Vik and Viv's.
Hmmmmm.
Frankie turned to face the full-length mirror that was up against the yellow wardrobe. She opened her robe and examined her body. Fit, muscular, and exquisitely proportioned, she agreed with the magazines. So what if her skin was mint? Or her limbs were attached with seams? According to the magazines, which were - no offense! - way more in touch with the times than her parents were, she was suppose to love her body just the way it was. And she did! Therefor if the normies read magazines (which obviously they did, because they were in them), then they would love her, too. Natural was in.
Besides she was Daddy's perfect little girl. And who didn't love perfect?
”
”
Lisi Harrison (Monster High (Monster High, #1))
“
To: Anna Oliphant
From: Etienne St. Clair
Subject: HAPPY CHRISTMAS
Have you gotten used to the time difference? Bloody hell,I can't sleep. I'd call,but I don't know if you're awake or doing the family thing or what. The bay fog is so thick that I can't see out my window.But if I could, I am quite certain I'd discover that I'm the only person alive in San Francisco.
To: Anna Oliphant
From: Etienne St. Clair
Subject: I forgot to tell you.
Yesterday I saw a guy wearing an Atlanta Film Festival shirt at the hospital.I asked if he knew you,but he didn't.I also met an enormous,hair man in a cheeky Mrs. Claus getup. he was handing out gifts to the cancer patients.Mum took the attached picture. Do I always look so startled?
To: Anna Oliphant
From: Etienne St. Clair
Subject: Are you awake yet?
Wake up.Wake up wake up wake up.
To: Etienne St. Clair
From: Anna Oliphant
Subject: re: Are you awake yet?
I'm awake! Seany started jumping on my bed,like,three hours ago. We've been opening presents and eating sugar cookies for breakfast. Dad gave me a gold ring shaped like a heart. "For Daddy's sweetheart," he said. As if I'm the type of girl who'd wear a heart-shaped ring. FROM HER FATHER. He gave Seany tons of Star Wars stuff and a rock polishing kit,and I'd much rather have those.I can't beleive Mom invited him here for Christmas. She says it's because their divorce is amicable (um,no) and Seany and I need a father figure in our lives,but all they ever do is fight.This morning it was about my hair.Dad wants me to dye it back, because he thinks I look like a "common prostitute," and Mom wants to re-bleach it.Like either of them has a say. Oops,gotta run.My grandparents just arrived,and Granddad is bellowing for his bonnie lass.That would be me.
P.S. Love the picture.Mrs. Claus is totally checking out your butt. And it's Merry Christmas, weirdo.
To: Anna Oliphant
From: Etienne St. Clair
Subject: HAHAHA@
Was it a PROMISE RING? Did your father give you a PROMISE RING?
To: Etienne St. Clair
From: Anna Oliphant
Subject: Re: HAHAHA!
I am so not responding to that.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
“
What is it that makes you cry? It is only your attachments. What is it that you miss when it is lost? It is the object of your attachment. Ponder over this. Find out what it is that grips your very life, without which you feel miserable and destitute; that is the center of your attachment.
Here is what you should do: make an effort to find out what things it would hurt you to lose. Then, before they are lost, open your hands little by little, relax your grip on them. This is the method for conquering attachment. There is bound to be pain, but you must bear it; this is your penance. It is not necessary to renounce anything. It is not that you should leave your wife and run away to the Himalayas. Remain there, where you are, but gradually stop depending on her. There is no need to cause any pain; your wife need not even know it. There is no need to tell her.
Seek out the attachments. Try gradually to live without the things that you now think you cannot live without. Create such a state within yourself that if and when these things are lost, there is not the slightest tremor within you. Then you will have attained victory over these attachments. This can be possible. It has been possible. And if it has happened to even one, it can happen to all.
”
”
Osho (Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery)
“
And Bram?"
Panic punched me in the chest. So far today she'd been willing to touch me, laugh with me, confide in me, and now she was wondering if Chas shouldn't go out with me? Had I misread something somewhere?
Chas shook her head and grinned. "Nah. Bram's too busy waiting."
"Waiting?" Nora didn't take her eyes from me. Maybe she wanted me to answer.
"For the right girl," I said curtly.
"And he has very specific physical preferences," Chas said. I grabbed her wrist and squeezed. She'd better not.
She did. "For some reason, he is terribly attracted to black hair. Tom's a leg man, himself...attached, unattached, doesn't really mtter. But Bram likes the hair."
With all the various methods of Chastity Disposal flying through my imagination-should I just shoot her, or should I open her skull and puree her brains with a motorized mixer, or perhaps set her on fire?-It took me a minute to notice me a very shy smile.
I dropped Chas's wrist. I almost dropped my machete.
Nora looked away and moved a few steps in front of us, leaping into the grass to flatten it for herself as she went.
"I win," Chas whispered.
"Smoke all you want," I whispered back.
”
”
Lia Habel (Dearly, Departed (Gone With the Respiration, #1))
“
Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me.
Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down.
The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway.
Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing.
And then rising from within me is a single thought:
I don’t want to die.
All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no.
Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live.
I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to!
Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes.
Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.
Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other.
I’m not done! I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine. I am not done here!
She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes.
“The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.”
The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation.
My heart begins to race.
Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all?
All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move.
Then the heart monitor stops beeping.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
“
Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot.
"See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!"
On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.
What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.
I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.
We have only to discover it—and ride.
”
”
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
“
I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school.
Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river.
Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out.
Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam."
Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning."
When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection...
...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?"
Gee, I hadn't thought of that."
Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -"
Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?"
When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes."
He kissed her.
She said, "Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can't get to the plasma. It'll help."
Yes, Tania"
And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?"
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?"
Gloria in Excelsis, please just a little more."
Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?"
You said that already. But yes, Tania."
Do you remember what the most important thing is?"
To always wear a condom."
She smacked his chest.
To stop the bleeding," he said, hugging her.
Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix."
Yes, Tania.
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
“
Origins Of Cptsd How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it. Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.
”
”
Pete Walker (Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving)
“
Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy's marriage; but as she thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she dropt all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility to Elizabeth.
Pemberley was now Georgiana's home; and the attachment of the sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.
Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew; and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth's persuasion, he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation; and, after a little farther resistance on the part of his aunt, her resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself: and she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.
With the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.
As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.
It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place-while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.
One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.
And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does; a desire to please, to look one's best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift - a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.
So it goes.
And suddenly they part, and suddenly there's a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.
Rome passed into the past, and became New York.
Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again - while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting - then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.
("For The Rest Of Her Life")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich (Angels of Darkness)
“
According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain.
As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen.
The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.
Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference.
The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed.
Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.
Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence.
So why does Daniel feel like something more?
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
Brian came in heavy at that moment on his guitar, the rapid, high-pitched squeal ranging back and forth as his fingers flew along the frets. As the intro's tempo grew more rapid, Bekka heard Derek's subtle bass line as it worked its way in. After another few seconds Will came in, slow at first, but racing along to match the others' pace. When their combined efforts seemed unable to get any heavier, David jumped into the mix.
As the sound got nice and heavy, Bekka began to rock back-and-forth onstage. In front of her, hundreds of metal-lovers began to jump and gyrate to their music. She matched their movements for a moment, enjoying the connection that was being made, before stepping over to the keyboard that had been set up behind her. Sliding her microphone into an attached cradle, she assumed her position and got ready. Right on cue, all the others stopped playing, throwing the auditorium into an abrupt silence. Before the crowd could react, however, Bekka's fingers began to work the keys, issuing a rhythm that was much softer and slower than what had been built up. The audience's violent thrash-dance calmed at that moment and they began to sway in response.
Bekka smiled to herself.
This is what she lived for.
”
”
Nathan Squiers (Death Metal)
“
Middlemarch is a novel that is diminished by being put on the screen. It can't help but be, because so much of what we enjoy in Middlemarch is the interplay between what the characters do and what we know about them because of the telling voice.
It's less of a problem for the cinema when it deals with novels that are purely concerned with action and what people do. I haven't thought this through, and I'm just trying it now to see what it sounds like. But maybe it would be less a problem with novels that are told in the first person. The interesting thing to me about Middlemarch, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and several other great novels, is precisely this omniscient, as we call it, third person, which naive readers mistake for the author. It isn't George Eliot who is saying this; it's a voice that George Eliot adopts to tell this story.
There can be something very interesting in a novel like Bleak House, which was also done very well on the television by the same adapter, Andrew Davis. Now, Bleak House is told in two voices, as you remember. One is the somewhat trying Esther Summerson, who is a paradigm of every kind of virtue, and the other is a different sort of voice entirely, a voice that tells the story in the present tense, which was unusual for the time, a voice that doesn't seem to have a main character attached to it.
But I think that Dickens is playing a very subtle game here. I've noticed a couple of things about that second narration that make me wonder whether it isn't Esther herself writing the other bits of it. For instance, at the very beginning, she says, "When I come to write my portion of these pages . . ." So she knows that there is another narrative going on, but nobody else does. Nobody else refers to it. The second thing is that she is the only character who never appears in those passages of present-tense narration. The other characters do. She doesn't. Why would that be? There's one point very near the end of the book where she almost does. Inspector Bucket is coming into the house to collect Esther to go and look for Lady Dedlock, who's run away, and we hear that Esther is just coming -- but no, she's turned back and brought her cloak, so we don't quite see her. It's as if she's teasing us and saying, "You're going to see me; no, you're not."
Now, that's Dickens, at the height of his powers, playing around -- in ways that we would now call, I don't know, postmodern, ironic, self-referential, or something -- with the whole notion of narration, characterization, and so on. Yet, it doesn't matter. Those things are there for us to notice and to enjoy and to relish, if we have the taste for that sort of thing. But the events of Bleak House are so thrilling, so perplexing, so exciting that a mere recital of the events themselves is enough to carry a whole television adaptation, a whole play, a whole story. It's so much better with Dickens's narrative playfulness there, but it's pretty good without them.
”
”
Philip Pullman
“
You are not really dying,” he said, the oddest tone to his voice, “are you?”Jem nodded. “So they tell me.”“I am sorry,” Will said.“No,” Jem said softly. He drew his jacket aside and took a knife from the belt at his waist.“Don’t be ordinary like that. Don’t say you’re sorry. Say you’ll train with me.”
He held out the knife to Will, hilt rst. Charlotte held her breath, afraid to move. She feltas if she were watching something very important happen, though she could not have saidwhat.Will reached out and took the knife, his eyes never leaving Jem’s face. His fingers brushedthe other boy’s as he took the weapon from him. It was the rst time, Charlotte thought,that she had ever seen him touch any other person willingly.“I’ll train with you,” he said.
Jem, Will’s parabatai, treated her with the distant sweet kindness reserved for the littlesisters of one’s friends, but he would always side with Will. Kindly, but rmly, he put Willabove everything else in the world.Well, nearly everything. She had been most struck by Jem when she rst came to theInstitute—he had an unearthly, unusual beauty, with his silvery hair and eyes and delicate features. He looked like a prince in a fairy-tale book, and she might have considered developing an attachment to him, were it not so absolutely clear that he was entirely inlove with Tessa Gray. His eyes followed her where she went, and his voice changed when hespoke to her. Cecily had once heard her mother say in amusement that one of theirneighbors’ boys looked at a girl as if she were “the only star in the sky” and that was theway Jem looked at Tessa.Cecily didn’t resent it: Tessa was pleasant and kind to her, if a little shy, and with herface always stuck in a book, like Will. If that was the sort of girl Jem wanted, she and henever would have suited—and the longer she remained at the Institute, the more sherealized how awkward it would have made things with Will. He was ferociously protectiveof Jem, and he would have watched her constantly in case she ever distressed or hurt him inany way. No—she was far better out of the whole thing.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))