Ballerina Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Ballerina. Here they are! All 100 of them:

How awfully convenient for you, regardless. And for him. He won't have to worry about you spilling his secrets." "Yeah," Jace said. "He's terrified I'll tell everyone that he's always wanted to be a ballerina.
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them!
Vicki Baum (Ballerina)
We aren’t normal. This place isn’t normal, and you’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
The only thing that would make her jealous would be if I led a parade riding a unicorn while ballerinas sang love songs.
Brandon Mull (Grip of the Shadow Plague (Fablehaven, #3))
She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
Letting him go There is a particular kind of suffering to be experienced when you love something greater than yourself. A tender sacrifice. Like the pained silence felt in the lost song of a mermaid; or the bent and broken feet of a dancing ballerina. It is in every considered step I am taking in the opposite direction of you.
Lang Leav
I'm not the glass ballerina," I said firmly. "I'm not going to shatter.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
You’re just jealous of me because I’m a tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian!
Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #11))
….watch me rise like smoke from fire. Watch me fly above your hate. Watch me dance upon your meanness like a ballerina with posture; grace. Watch me laugh over your hatred; watch me soar above your sea of grief. And know that I am out there somewhere… C R U S H I N G.
Coco J. Ginger
Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
Erol Ozan
I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.
Anton Chekhov
Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
I told you kid... You're not a player. You're the glass ballerina--- or the knife.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
The "feminine" woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
Susan Faludi (Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women)
Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?' No,' I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle.
Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl (Stargirl, #2))
He wont have to worry about you spilling his secrets.” “Yeah,” Jace said, “he‘s terrified I‘ll tell everyone that he‘s always really wanted to be a ballerina.” -Inquisitor & Jace about Valentine, pg.123-
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.
Anthony Bourdain
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
The phrase "in the dark," as I'm sure you know, can refer not only to one's shadowy surroundings, but also to the shadowy secrets of which one might be unaware. Every day, the sun goes down over all these secrets, and so everyone is in the dark in one way or another. If you are sunbathing in a park, for instance, but you do not know that a locked cabinet is buried fifty feet beneath your blanket, then you are in the dark even though you are not actually in the dark, whereas if you are on a midnight hike, knowing full well that several ballerinas are following close behind you, then you are not in the dark even if you are in fact in the dark. Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, as well as to be not in the dark not in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nonetheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captain of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Death is my art form--when I fight, I'm a ballerina. Graceful. Chi lacks my grace, but makes up for it in energy and enthusiasm. His fighting style is like breakdancing--strong and frenetic with some really sweet moves. Jo's is . . .the Macarena. Ugly but gets the job done.
Eliza Crewe (Cracked (Soul Eaters, #1))
Dance less in motion and more in spirit; awaken the dreamer within.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Horses have powerful legs- but that doesn't mean they're prima ballerinas. Elianna to Mariketa.
Kresley Cole (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (Immortals After Dark, #3))
If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Dance as the narration of a magical story; that recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Bramble's lips were tight. Her fists still shook. "Take it back," she said. She gazed at the floor, but the words whipped. "We don't want the picture. We don't want your charity. Take it back!" Teddie drew himself up to his full, towering taffy height. "N-dash it-O!" he said. "It's not charity and I won't take it back! It's a gift! A gift, dash it all! Because I liked your mum! And I like your sisters! And you, Bramble! I love you!" The words echoed. Everyone's hands clasped over their mouths, and they stared at Lord Teddie, who panted but kept a tight chin up. Bramble's lips were still pursed. They were white. "Young man," said the King gently. "Your ship leaves soon?" Azalea guessed that, with the fiasco of everything, the King had annulled any arrangements between Bramble and Lord Teddie. Lord Teddie's entire taffylike form slumped. He turned to go, all bounciness dissolved. "Do you mean it?" Lord Teddie turned quickly. Bramble's lips remained tight, but her gaze was up, blazing yellow. "Gad, yes," said Lord Teddie. "I love you so much, my fingers hurt!" "Oh!" Bramble slapped he hand over her mouth and doubled over. "Oh-oh-oh-oh!" She shook. It was hard to tell if she was crying, or coughing, or ill. "Oh!" In a billow of skirts, Bramble leaped. It was a grand jete worthy of the Delchastrian prima ballerina. She landed right on Lord Teddie, who had no choice but to catch her, and threw her arms around his neck. Then, to everyone's shock, she pressed her lips full on his. "Oh...my," said Clover. No one seemed more surprised than Lord Teddie who stumbled back under Bramble's assault.
Heather Dixon Wallwork (Entwined)
He looked like a hallucinating ballerina in boxer shorts,
Rick Riordan (The Dark Prophecy (The Trials of Apollo, #2))
Dance is the timeless interpretation of life.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.
Shah Asad Rizvi
If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.
Shah Asad Rizvi
I feel such a difference between a philologist/linguist and a linguaphile as, say, a choreographer and a ballerina.
Kató Lomb (Polyglot: How I Learn Languages)
If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.
Shah Asad Rizvi
My father didn't take the sword for me. he took it for him. I doubt he even knew about the trial." "How awfully convenient for you, regardless. And for him. He won't have to worry about you spilling his secrets." "Yeah," Jace said, "he's terrified I'll tell everyone that's he's always really wanted to be a ballerina." The Inquisitor simply stared at him.
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
Don't breathe to survive; dance and feel alive.
Shah Asad Rizvi
From age four to five we are all romantics; we are all embryonic royalty, budding ballerinas, or intrepid astronauts; we are all fearless, open, affectionate, and beautiful.
Vaillant
Nobody approves of the ballerina and the poor boy.
Nichele Reese (Juilliard or Else)
moja mała baletnica.” My little ballerina.
Sophie Lark (Stolen Heir (Brutal Birthright, #2))
Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance and poetry.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Music does not need language of words for it has movements of dance to do its translation.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Dance to inspire, dance to freedom, life is about experiences so dance and let yourself become free.
Shah Asad Rizvi
If anything at all, perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Maria Tallchief
Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.
Shah Asad Rizvi
All you butterflies and you ballerinas, dance until you fall. Dream and believe. Follow what you're searching for.
Julian Lennon
There is a particular kind of suffering to be experienced when you love something greater than yourself. A tender sacrifice.   Like the pained silence felt in the lost song of a mermaid; or the bent and broken feet of a dancing ballerina. It is in every considered step I am taking in the opposite direction of you.
Lang Leav (Love & Misadventure)
After tiny has tried ballerina pose, swing-batter-batter pose, pump-up-the-jam pose, and top-of-the-mountain-sound-of-music pose in the reflection of the bean, he walks us to a bench overlooking lake shore drive.
David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
DANCE – Defeat All Negativity (via) Creative Expression.
Shah Asad Rizvi
As the last curtain falls on a spent year, a new year pirouettes to center stage with the elegance and charm of a prima ballerina – and delivers the promise of peace, hope, love and joy.
Peggy Toney Horton
Soar like an eagle beyond skies of heavens reach; as wings of dreams dance with winds of reality.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Dance resides within us all. Some find it when joy conquers sorrow, others express it through celebration of movements; and then there are those... whose existence is dance,
Shah Asad Rizvi
She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Don't step on the rug. It's a bit ... peckish." ... In a billow of skirts, Bramble leaped. It was a grand jeté worthy of the Delchastrian prima ballerina. She landed right on Lord Teddie, who had no choice but to catch her, and threw her arms around his neck. Then, to everyone's shock, she pressed her lips full on his. "Oh ... my," said Clover. No one seemed more surprised than Lord Teddie, who stumbled back under Bramble's assault. He staggered onto the magicked rug. In a blur of red, the rug clapped over them like a red snapdragon. The entire package overbalanced and fell to the ground with a whumpf. No one moved inside the rug. Everyone stared. "Sorry," said Eve. "What just happened?" From the rug came a muffled Mmm mmm mmfph. "We'd better take them out," said Azalea. "Before they start to digest.
Heather Dixon Wallwork (Entwined)
The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.
Tara Westover (Educated)
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.
Susan Jane Gilman
Decide what you want. Declare it to the world. See yourself winning. And remember that if you are persistent as well as patient, you can get whatever you seek.
Misty Copeland (Ballerina Body: Dancing and Eating Your Way to a Leaner, Stronger, and More Graceful You)
Dance is the ritual of immortality.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Stepping lightly, just like a ballerina.
Van Morrison (Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics)
My attitude toward spiders is similar to my attitude toward ballerinas: I am in awe of your natural beauty and flawless instincts, but if you come in my house I will kill you.
Eric D. Snider
Yes, Mel. That's exactly why I left without explaining. Because I think about you before I think about myself. Always remember that, Little Ballerina. Always.
L.J. Shen (Defy (Sinners of Saint, #0.5))
I was the glass ballerina or the knife.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
One step, two steps, three steps; like winds of time experience joy of centuries, when movements become revelations of the dance of destinies.
Shah Asad Rizvi
When the melody plays, footsteps move, heart sings and spirit begin to dance.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.
Donna Tartt (The Little Friend (Vintage Contemporaries))
The difference between being an amazing technician and being a soloist or principal is mastering those interpretive flourishes to tell the best story. Otherwise you aren’t a ballerina—you’re just another dancer.
Misty Copeland (Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina)
Chris was in the rocker, fully clothed, and was strumming idly on Cory's guitar. "Dance, ballerina, dance," he softly chanted, and his singing voice wasn't bad at all. Maybe we could work as musicians---a trio -if Carrie ever recovered enough to want a voice again.
V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic (Dollanganger, #1))
Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.
Saul Bellow (Ravelstein)
What are you doing, little ballerina?” he growls.
Sophie Lark (Stolen Heir (Brutal Birthright, #2))
All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office.
Lisa Jewell (Then She Was Gone)
Fucking the fancy prima ballerina up against the wall like the filthy girl she really is? Much, much better than getting another tattoo.
Elsie Silver (Powerless (Chestnut Springs, #3))
You know how ballerinas pick a spot to look at when they’re doing a pirouette so they don’t get dizzy? Bridget was Magnolia’s spot on the wall.
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark (Magnolia Parks Universe, #5))
put on a performance that hid all the strings, leaving only stardust for the audience to see.
Misty Copeland (Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina)
There are those who dance the notes and those who dance the music.
Eva Ibbotson
Proprio non capisci, Ehlena?" Con delicatezza le accarezzò il polpaccio e le sollevò il piede, posandolo sulla propria coscia. Poi, slacciando le stringhe della misera ballerina di tela Keds, mormorò: "Qualunque cosa indossi... per me sarai sempre una regina.
J.R. Ward (Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #7))
Vere spoke again, “You want us to hide this six-foot-three, positively gorgeous, famous rock star—one who has sports-drink blue eyes BY THE WAY—and who is absolutely PERFECT looking, at Palmer Divide High? In this town? In my junior class?” “Yes,” Mrs. Roth answered. “Why is it such a difficult concept for you to grasp?” “Because guys who look like that.” She pointed a finger at him. “Do not come from this town. In addition to the face, he’s too tall, and he’s got the posture of some Russian—ballerina! And did you not notice his voice?” “What’s wrong with my voice?” Hunter frowned. “It’s all LOW and, SUPER-MANLY-AMAZING,” she modulated her voice down, trying to sound like him. Charlie cracked up, and Hunter had to bury his own laugh.
Anne Eliot (Unmaking Hunter Kennedy)
We were blessed, and with blessing comes responsibility.
Michaela DePrince (Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina)
I missed her smile…the way she would roll her eyes when she thought I was being ridiculous…the quiet way she almost tiptoed when she walked that gave her away as a ballerina…the fact that she could probably give me a fairly decent ass-kicking if she set her mind to it. I missed it all. I missed her.
M.A. George (Relativity (Proximity, #2))
Lo!" I said. "I arrived at Camp Half-Blood as Lester Papadopoulos!" "A pathetic mortal!" Calypso chorused. "Most worthless of teens!" I glared at her, but I didn't dare stop my performance again. "I overcame many challenges with my companion, Meg McCaffrey!" "He means his master!" Calypso added. "A twelve-year-old girl! Behold her pathetic slave, Lester, most worthless of teens!" The policeman huffed impatiently. "We know all this. The emperor told us." "Shh," said Nanette. "Be polite." I put my hand over my heart. "We secured the Grove of Dodona, an ancient Oracle, and thwarted the plans of Nero! But, alas, Meg McCaffrey fled from me. Her evil stepfather had poisoned her mind!" "Poison!" Calypso cried. "Like the breath of Lester Papadopoulos, most worthless of teens!" I resisted the urge to push Calypso into the flower bed. Meanwhile, Leo was making his way towards the bulldozer under the guise of an interpretive dance routine, spinning and gasping and pantomiming my words. He looked like a hallucinating ballerina in boxer shorts, but the blemmyae politely got out of his way. "Lo!" I shouted. "From the Oracle of Dodona we received a prophecy - a limerick most terrible!" "Terrible!" Calypso chorused. "Like the skills of Lester, most worthless of teens!" "Vary your adjectives," I grumbled, then continued for my audience: "We travelled west in search of another Oracle, along the way fighting many fearsome foes! The Cyclopes we brought low!
Rick Riordan (The Dark Prophecy (The Trials of Apollo, #2))
The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.
Tara Westover (Educated)
At playtime she twirled and spun across the playground so fast that none of the little boys in her class could catch her and they were all very cross.
Katharine Holabird
Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Dance is that delicacy of life radiating every particle of our existence with happiness.
Shah Asad Rizvi
At what grade do we stop believing in ourselves? At what grade do we stop believing period? I mean, someone has to be a Noble Peace Prize winner, someone has to be a ballerina. Why not us? I can't be the only one who gets that.
Chris Colfer
Dance, Ballerina, dance, and do your pirouette In rhythm with your aching heart, Dance, Ballerina, dance, you mustn't once forget A dancer has to dance the part, Once you said his love must wait its turn, You wanted fame instead, I guess that's your concern, We live and learn...and love is gone, Ballerina, gone...
V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic (Dollanganger, #1))
Transcend the terrestrial; surpass the celestial, from nature’s hands when you receive the sublime pleasures of dance.
Shah Asad Rizvi
Hearts shall dance once again; when canvas of ice is painted with the brush of skates.
Shah Asad Rizvi
I watch the beautiful performance with an ache in my chest. Then, just when I can’t stand the sadness anymore, a dancer floats out from the side of the stage. A dancer in ragged clothes, filthy and half starved. He’s not even in ballet shoes. He’s just barefoot as he glides out to take his place in the dance. The other dancers turn to him, and it’s clear that he is one of them. One of the lost ones. By the look on their faces, they weren’t expecting him. This is not part of the practiced show. He must have seen them onstage and joined in. Amazingly, the dance continues without a missed beat. The newcomer simply glides into place, and the final dancer who should have danced solo with her missing partner dances with the newcomer. It is full of joy, and the ballerina actually laughs. Her voice is clear and high, and it lifts us all.
Susan Ee (End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days, #3))
Chester stood on the shore watching the waves. Some rose, broke and were subsumed by those that followed. Some danced, their white frothy tops rising and falling rhythmically like a ballerina’s white tutu and in their joy they made progress. Others lazily rolled in and fell short of any prize. Occasionally one roared and raced in as if to capture as much of the land as possible.
Anna Faversham (Immortality: This Is Probably a Novel)
Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.
Eva Ibbotson (A Company of Swans)
There are no good tights, It´s all such a rare sight... Gently, I put one in. Holes are within! They´re only good for a fight.
Ana Claudia Antunes (ACross Tic)
I was graceful in the ballet studio, but elsewhere I was always tripping and running into things. And I was constantly spilling food on my clothes.
Michaela DePrince (Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina)
Cassidy," Flick whispers. "Max is fucking you with his eyes right now.
Nicci Harris (Our Thing: The Ballerina & The Butcher Boy (Kids of The District #1-2))
I love you, Max Butcher," I whisper. "I don't deserve you" - he presses his lips to mine - "Cassidy Slater. I'm keeping you anyway.
Nicci Harris (Our Thing: The Ballerina & The Butcher Boy (Kids of The District #1-2))
Classic Ballet, Keep away, keep building your creaky fairy castles, keep cloning clones and meaningless manners, hang on to your beanstalk ballerinas and their midget male shadows, run yourself out of business with your tons of froufrou and costly clattery toe shoes that ruin all chances for illusions of lightness, keep on crowding the minds of blind balletomanes who prefer dainty poses to the eloquent strength of momentum, who have forgotten or never known the manings of gesture, who would nod their noses to barefoot embargos ("so grab me" spelt backwards). Continue to repolish your stiff technique and to ignore a public that hungers for something other than a bag of tricks and the empty-headedness of surface patterns. Just keep it up, keep imitating yourself, and, , go grow your own dance makers. Come on, don't keep trying to filter modern ones through your so-safe extablishment. We're to be seen undiluted, undistorted, not absorbed by your hollow world like blood into a sponge. Yours truly, A Different Leaf on Our Family Tree
Paul Taylor (Private Domain: An Autobiography)
All Souls’ Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won’t get homemade popcorn balls any more, though, or apples: rumors of razor blades abound, and the possibility of poison. Even by the time of my own children, we worried about the apples. There’s too much loose malice blowing around. In Mexico they do this festival the right way, with no disguises. Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the graves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul. Everyone goes away happy, including the dead. We’ve rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to name them, we refuse to feed them. Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to hear, and hungrier.
Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)
First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day.
Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs)
A jewelry box? Ballerinas? She'd been such an active girl that any jewelry she'd been given would have been lost or broken right away. It was Faye Marie who'd loved- "My sister," she gasped, then louder. "My sister!" She clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture. "My lord, I beg pardon of you, but you're mistaken. I believe you gifted that treasure box to my older sister, Faye Marie. She's the one who loved ballerinas. I was obsessed with-" "Pegasus." The old justice's eyes melted from cold to kindness. "It was a trick question. I'd forgotten your birthday was so close to mine, and shared my spice cake out of pure guilt." His lined face wrinkled as he smiled with a fond memory. "You were a kind little soul, unspoiled for a girl raised in such wealth. You forgave me instantly and informed me that spice cake was, indeed, your favorite present ever received.
Kerrigan Byrne (The Highwayman (Victorian Rebels, #1))
The little girls in Room 4 were playing breakup. The ballerina doll was breaking up with the sailor doll. “I’m sorry, John,” she said in a brisk, businesslike voice—Jilly’s voice, actually—“but I’m in love with somebody else.” “Who?” the sailor doll asked. It was Emma G. who was speaking for him, holding him up by the waist of his little blue middy blouse. “I can’t tell you who, on account of he’s your best friend and so it would hurt your feelings.” “Well, that’s just stupid,” Emma B. pointed out from the sidelines. “Now he knows anyhow, since you said it was his best friend.” “He could have a whole bunch of best friends, though.” “No, he couldn’t. Not if they were ‘best.’ ” “Yes, he could. Me, I have four best friends.” “You’re a weirdo, then.” “Kate! Did you hear what she called me?” “What do you care?” Kate asked. She was helping Jameesha take her painting smock off. “Tell her she’s weird herself.” “You’re weird yourself,” Jilly told Emma B. “Am not.” “Are so.” “Am not.” “Kate said you were, so there!” “I didn’t say that,” Kate said. “Did so.” Kate was about to say, “Did not,” but she changed it to, “Well, anyhow, I wasn’t the one who started it.
Anne Tyler (Vinegar Girl)
In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas)
Y Brando nunca se había reído tanto en toda su vida, al grado de verter lágrimas histéricas y de tener que sujetarse de las paredes y de sus amigos para no caer al piso, con el cerebro arrebolado por la mota y la cerveza y el vientre adolorido de tanto carcajearse del espectáculo que ofrecían las locas, la legión de maricas, vestidas y travoltas venidas de todos los rincones de la república nomás a desatarse al famoso carnaval de Villagarbosa, a jotear libremente en las calles del pueblo embutidas en apretadas mallas de ballerina, disfrazadas de hadas con alas de mariposa, de sensuales enfermeras de la Cruz Roja, de porristas y gimnastas musculosas, policías manfloras y gatúbelas ventrudas con botas de tacón de aguja; locas bien locas vestidas de novia persiguiendo a los muchachos por los callejones; locas bufonescas con nalgas y tetas gargantuescas tratando de besar a los rancheros en la boca; locas empolvadas como geishas, con antenas de alienígenas y garrotes cavernícolas, locas capuchinas y escocesas; locas disfrazadas de batos bien machines, tan hombres como cualquiera, hasta que se alzaban los lentes oscuros y les notabas la depilada de ceja, los párpados espolvoreados con brillantina de colores, la mirada braguetera; locas que pagaban las cervezas si bailabas con ellas; locas que se peleaban a puñetazo limpio por tus favores, que se arrancaban las pelucas y las tiaras y rodaban por el suelo entre alaridos, dejando sangre y lentejuelas regadas mientras la turba reía. Total
Fernanda Melchor (Temporada de huracanes)