Barnes Quotes

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

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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.
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Djuna Barnes
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Everything’s a game, Avery Grambs. The only thing we get to decide in this life is if we play to win.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, butβ€”mainlyβ€”to ourselves.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Why do I have to tell a story?” I asked. β€œBecause if you don’t tell the story, someone else will tell it for you.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Heads, I kiss you. Tails, you kiss me. And either way, it means something.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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Bryn, when you were six years old, you tried to bungee jump off a jungle gym by connecting the straps of your overalls to the bars with your shoelaces. Caution has never been your strong suit.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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We aren’t normal. This place isn’t normal, and you’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerinaβ€”or the knife.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete. Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really: See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.
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Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
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Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone
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Stephen King (Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4))
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Sometimes things that appear very different on the surface are actually exactly the same at their core.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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If yes is no and once is never, then how many sides does a triangle have?
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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There are bad people in the world: Murderers and psychopaths and telemarketers who won't take no for an answer.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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Est unus ex nobis. Nos defendat eius." She is one of us. We protect her.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.
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Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta))
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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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You're a lot like that bird in the barn. You're so scared that you're going to be caged in forever you can't see the way out. You smack yourself against the wall again and again and again. The door is open, Beth. Stop running in circles and walk out.
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Katie McGarry (Dare You To (Pushing the Limits, #2))
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He left you the fortune, Avery, and all he left us is you.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Traps upon traps. And riddles upon riddles.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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You don't have to kiss me. You don't even have to like me, Heiress, but please don't make me do this alone.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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As awful as it sounds, money is power, and power is magnetic.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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I have a free couple of hours," I told him, walking toward my car, which was parked on the next block. "There's a very private, very secluded barn in Lookout Hill Park behind the carousel. I could be there in fifteen minutes." I heard the smile in his voice. "You want me bad.
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Becca Fitzpatrick (Finale (Hush, Hush, #4))
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Nothing is certain but death and taxes.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father's world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn't known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him. The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he'd been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.
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Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
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Better the devil you do know than the devil you don't
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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why kill two birds with one stone when you can kill twelve
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
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Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10Β½ Chapters)
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I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Averyβ€”some things are too precious to gamble.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
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I came to see you,” Jameson told me. β€œEvery day. The least you could have done was wake up while I was here, tragically backlit, unspeakably handsome, and waiting.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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How did you do that?” I shrug. β€œI click my heels three times and say, β€˜There’s no place like home.’” β€œUh-huh. So … you think this is your home? My barn? His tone is playful, but the look he’s giving me is dead serious. A question. β€œHaven’t you guessed by now?” I say, my heart hammering. β€œMy home is you.
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Cynthia Hand (Boundless (Unearthly, #3))
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I was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and screwed. In that order.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights β€” the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery β€” hay and a barn for human cattle.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
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When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better--those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.
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Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby)
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Knock, knock. (Desiderius) Now, ain't this a bitch. Here I am, trying to kiss my girl, and you have to interrupt us. What, were you raised in a barn? By the way, touch the woman, or the Lamborghini, and you're a dead man. (Kyrian)
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Night Pleasures (Dark-Hunter #1))
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The trick to being abandoned was to never let yourself long for anyone who left.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeededβ€”and how pitiful that was.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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The only person I trust with all that I am and all that could be, Heiress, is you.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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Sloane slipped an arm around my waist. "There are fourteen varieties of hugs," she said. "This is one of them.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Naturals (The Naturals, #1))
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I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Picture yourself standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The wind is whipping your hair. The sun is setting. You long, body and soul, for one thing. One person. You hear footsteps behind you. You turn. Who's there? I remembered a voice. Jameson Winchester Hawthorne.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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It would be shame," Jameson commented, "if we were related.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Sometimes all a girl really needed was a very bad idea.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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Getting involved with Jameson would just be throwing gasoline on the fire." "And what a lovely fire it would be,
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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You feel stupid. Doesn't mean you are.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Naturals (The Naturals, #1))
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(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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I don't do vulnerable," Thea retorted. "It clashes with my bitch aesthetic.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
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I will always protect you" he told me, his jaw tight, his eyes shadowed. "You deserve to feel safe in your own home. And I'll help you with the foundation. I'll teach you what you need to know to take this life like you were born to it. But this...us..." He swallowed. "It can't happen, Avery. I've seen the way Jamerson looks at you.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Grayson told me. β€œI wanted her to be you.” β€œDon’t say that,” I whispered. He looked at me one last time. β€œThere are so many things that I will never say.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
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I'm not Team Gale or Team Peeta. I'm Team Katniss...the core story in the Hunger Games trilogy has less to do with who Katniss ends up with and more to do with who she is - because sometimes, in books and in life, it's not about the romance. Sometimes, it's about the girl.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy)
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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Julian Barnes
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A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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If there's one thing the Hawthorne family isn't, it's fine. They were a twisted, broken mess before you got here, and they'll be a twisted, broken mess once you're gone.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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Lake, could you please stop sweet-talking the weapons? It's kind of freaking me out.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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You have no right to tell me-" "You do not want to finish that sentence, missy. You want to sit down, close your mouth, and eat." "How am I supposed to eat with my mouth closed?
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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The more complicated a person’s strategy seemed, the less likely an opponent was to look for simple answers. If you could keep someone looking at your knight, you could take them with a pawn. Look past the details. Past the complications.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1))
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I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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It's not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It's the good ones.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2))
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Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.
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Albert Einstein
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That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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You think I didn’t fight the same fight? I halfway convinced myself that as long as Avery was just a riddle or a puzzle, as long as I was just playing, I’d be fine. Well, joke’s on me, because somewhere along the way, I stopped playing.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Hawthorne Legacy (The Inheritance Games, #2))
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We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
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Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)
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He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.
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Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)
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Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ``What shall we eat?'' or ``What shall we drink?'' or ``What shall we wear?'' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. - Matthew 6:25-34
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible: King James Version)
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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Julian Barnes (A Life with Books)
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Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
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P.J. O'Rourke
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That is one fine female, true?" V said. There was a low, affirmative grumble. "And someone you do not want to mess with," the brother continued. "Man, you should have seen her when we came into that barn. She was standing over his body, ready to take the cop and me on with her bare hands if she had to. Like Wrath was her cub, you feel me?" "Wonder if she has a sister?" Rhage asked. Phury laughed. "You wouldn't know what to do with yourself if you ran into a female of worth." "This coming from you, Celibate?" But then Hollywood rubbed the stubble on his chin, as if considering the ways of the universe. "Ah, hell, Phury, you're probably right. Still, a male can dream." "He sure can," V murmured.
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J.R. Ward (Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1))
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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.
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Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
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Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And alsoβ€”if this isn't too grand a wordβ€”our tragedy.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Tell me about the farm," she pleaded as drops of blood began to appear on her hand. "The farm?" "The farm that Finnikin the peasant would have lived on with his bride." "Evanjalin. That was her name. Did I mention that?" She laughed through a sob. "No, you didn't." "They would plant rows upon rows of wheat and barley, and each night they would sit under the stars to admire what they owned. Oh, and they would argue. She believes the money made would be better spent on a horse, and he believes they need a new barn. But then later they would forget all their anger and he would hold her fiercely and never let her go." "And he'd place marigolds in her hair?" she asked. He clasped her hands against his and watched her blood seep through the lines of his skin. "And he would love her until the day he died," he said.
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Melina Marchetta (Finnikin of the Rock (Lumatere Chronicles, #1))
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And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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Sometimes you have an idea of a person β€” about who they are, about what you'd be like together. But sometimes that's all that it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.” He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. β€œIt was never just the idea of you, Avery.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games, #3))
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That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
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Sojourner Truth
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Katie nosed at the carpet and then gave it a good chew. When it proved recalcitrant enough that she couldn't pull it up, she growled. "Who's a fierce little girl?" I asked her. "Who's going to kick butt and take names and help her big sister get into all kinds of trouble someday?" Devon snorted. "Sometimes, I think the term bad influence was invented specifically with you in mind.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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Lucius paused, turning on his heel to face me. "I grow weary of your ignorance." He moved closer to me, leaning down and peering into my eyes. "Because your parents refuse to inform you, I will deliver the news myself,and I shall make this simple for you." He pointed to his chest and announced, as though talking to a child, "I am a vampire." He pointed to my chest. "You are a vampire. And we are to be married, the moment you come of age. This has been decreed since our births." I couldn't even process the "getting married" part, or the thing about "decreed." He'd lost me at "vampire." Nuts. Lucius Vladescu is completely nuts. And I'm alone with him, in an empty barn. So I did what any sane person would do. I jammed the pitchfork in the general direction of his foot and ran like hell for the house, ignoring his yowl of pain.
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Beth Fantaskey (Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side (Jessica, #1))
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Not going to walk me to the door?" I asked, pretending to be shocked at his lack of gallantry. "Of course I am. many would think that a bonny lass such as yerself wouldst be able to stay out of trouble for a distance of fifteen feet, but I know better." "Did you just use the words yerself and wouldst in the same sentence? You can't be a pirate and a courtier at the same time, Dev. It just isn't done.
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves, #1))
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I like places like this," he announced. I like old places too," Josh said, "but what's to like about a place like this?" The king spread his arms wide. "What do you see?" Josh made a face. "Junk. Rusted tractor, broken plow, old bike." Ahh...but I see a tractor that was once used to till these fields. I see the plow it once pulled. I see a bicycle carefully placed out of harm's way under a table." Josh slowly turned again, looking at the items once more. And i see these things and I wonder at the life of the person who carefully stored the precious tractor and plow in the barn out of the weather, and placed their bike under a homemade table." Why do you wonder?" Josh asked. "Why is it even important?" Because someone has to remember," Gilgamesh snapped, suddenly irritated. "Some one has to remember the human who rode the bike and drove the tractor, the person who tilled the fields, who was born and lived and died, who loved and laughed and cried, the person who shivered in the cold and sweated in the sun." He walked around the barn again, touching each item, until his palm were red with rust." It is only when no one remembers, that you are truely lost. That is the true death.
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Michael Scott (The Sorceress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, #3))
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You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
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Julian Barnes (Levels of Life)
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I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However...who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life. But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurtβ€”and inflicted for precisely that reason.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
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We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
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Don DeLillo (White Noise)
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You're a freak. But I really can't accept these-' Were you raised in a barn? Don't be ruuuuuude, my boy. They're a gift.' Blay shook his head. 'Take them, John. You're just going to lose this argument, and it will save us from the theatrics.' Theatrics?' Qhuinn leaped up and assumed a Roman oratory pose. 'Whither thou knowest thy ass from thy elbow, young scribe?' Blay blushed. 'Come on-' Qhuinn threw himself at Blay, grasping onto the guy's shoulders and hanging his full weight off him. 'Hold me. Your insult has left me breathless. I'm agasp.' Blay grunted and scrambled to keep Qhuinn up off the floor. 'That's agape.' Agasp sounds better.' Blay was trying not to smile, trying not to be delighted, but his eyes were sparkling like sapphires and his cheeks were getting red. With a silent laugh, John sat on one of the locker room benches, shook out his pair of white socks, and pulled them on under his new old jeans. 'You sure, Qhuinn? 'Cause I have a feeling they're going to fit and you might change your mind. Qhuinn abruptly lifted himself off Blay and straightened his clothes with a sharp tug. 'And now you offend my honor.' Facing off at John, he flipped into a fencing stance. TouchΓ©.' Blay laughed. 'That's en garde, you damn fool.' Qhuinn shot a look over his shoulder. 'Γ§a va, Brutus?' Et tu?' That would be tutu, I believe, and you can keep the cross-dressing to yourself, ya perv.' Qhuinn flashed a brilliant smile, all twelve kinds of proud for being such an ass. 'Now, put the fuckers on, John, and let's be done with this. Before we have to put Blay in an iron lung.' Try sanitarium.' No, thanks, I had a big lunch.
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J.R. Ward (Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #6))
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I was on a mission. I had to learn to comfort myself, to see what others saw in me and believe it. I needed to discover what the hell made me happy other than being in love. Mission impossible. When did figuring out what makes you happy become work? How had I let myself get to this point, where I had to learn me..? It was embarrassing. In my college psychology class, I had studied theories of adult development and learned that our twenties are for experimenting, exploring different jobs, and discovering what fulfills us. My professor warned against graduate school, asserting, "You're not fully formed yet. You don't know if it's what you really want to do with your life because you haven't tried enough things." Oh, no, not me.." And if you rush into something you're unsure about, you might awake midlife with a crisis on your hands," he had lectured it. Hi. Try waking up a whole lot sooner with a pre-thirty predicament worm dangling from your early bird mouth. "Well to begin," Phone Therapist responded, "you have to learn to take care of yourself. To nurture and comfort that little girl inside you, to realize you are quite capable of relying on yourself. I want you to try to remember what brought you comfort when you were younger." Bowls of cereal after school, coated in a pool of orange-blossom honey. Dragging my finger along the edge of a plate of mashed potatoes. I knew I should have thought "tea" or "bath," but I didn't. Did she want me to answer aloud? "Grilled cheese?" I said hesitantly. "Okay, good. What else?" I thought of marionette shows where I'd held my mother's hand and looked at her after a funny part to see if she was delighted, of brisket sandwiches with ketchup, like my dad ordered. Sliding barn doors, baskets of brown eggs, steamed windows, doubled socks, cupcake paper, and rolled sweater collars. Cookouts where the fathers handled the meat, licking wobbly batter off wire beaters, Christmas ornaments in their boxes, peanut butter on apple slices, the sounds and light beneath an overturned canoe, the pine needle path to the ocean near my mother's house, the crunch of snow beneath my red winter boots, bedtime stories. "My parents," I said. Damn. I felt like she made me say the secret word and just won extra points on the Psychology Game Network. It always comes down to our parents in therapy.
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Stephanie Klein (Straight Up and Dirty)