Cartwheel Quotes

What?" Jace was still staring at her as if she'd told him she'd found one of the Silent Brothers doing nude cartwheels in the hallway.

Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.

I've never wanted more, until I met you." I gasp, reeling. Oh my. Isn't this what I want? He wants more. He wants it, too! My inner goddess has back-flipped off the podium and is doing a cartwheels around the stadium. It's not just me.

Inside, I'm doing graceful cartwheels in my head, knowing full well that's the only place I can do graceful cartwheels.

The Silent brothers are doing nude cartwheels in the hallways

I am a greaser," Sodapop chanted. "I am a JD and a hood. I blacken the name of our fair city. I beat up people. I rob gas stations. I am a menace to society. Man, do I have fun!" "Greaser...greaser...greaser..."Steve singsonged. "O, victim of enviornment, underprivelaged, rotton no-count hood!" Juvenile delinquent, you're no good!" Darry shouted. Get thee hence, white trash," Two-Bit said in asnobbish voice. "I am a Soc. I am the privelaged and the well-dressed. I throw beer blasts, drive fancy cars, break windows at fancy parties." And what do you do for fun?" I inquired in a serious, awed voice. I jump greasers!" Two-Bit screamed, and did a cartwheel.

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.

You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.

Reading is almost exactly like a cartwheel; it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless

Romanians have a saying, 'Not every dog has a bagel on its tail.' It means that not all streets are paved with gold. When I began my career, I just wanted to do cartwheels.

She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel. "You look fucking ridiculous," she told herself.

Without illusions. I love you because you are fallible and because your poor misguided testosterone-corrupted brain has you doing cartwheels trying not to be. I love you because of all you are and because of all you're not. And because, no matter what, you are all the man I'll ever need.

Did a cartwheel the other day. Found out it is most definitely not like riding a bike.

Once there was a man and a woman. When they met sparks flew, meteors collided, asteroids turned cartwheels and atoms split. He loved her from here to eternity, she loved him to the moon and back. They were two peas in a pod, heads and tails and noughts and crosses.

I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)

His laugh cartwheels across the room.

She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless.

The Evasive Cartwheel ™ © etc., Bartimaeus of Uruk, circa. 2800 B.C.E. Often imitated, never surpassed. As famously memorialized in the New Kingdom tomb paintings of Ramses III— you can just see me in the background of The Dedication of the Royal Family before Ra, wheeling out of sight behind the pharaoh.

Those kids, they would've loved this place, they would've walked and skipped and danced here, all legs and sunny hair. They'd have cartwheeled the lawn, shouting, "And don't go lookin' at our knickers, right?

Learning to be an adult was learning that your best was rarely quite enough.

You are meant for great things,” she replied. “But better keep yourself alive for me, soldier, because I can’t continue to live without you.” That’s what she said, looking up into his face, her hands on his beating heart. He bent down and kissed her freckles. “You can’t continue? My cartwheeling queen of Lake Ilmen?” Smiling, he shook his head. “You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,” Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling of Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.

Will you say something?" he asked. "Like what? Congratulations on almost getting yourself killed? I mean, you just told me that you flew here on some kind of winged motorcycle while masked men in jet packs tried to shoot you with ray guns. Forgive me if I don't do cartwheels through the restaurant while I try to decide if you've lost your mind.

Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always.

How could he hate the Jews and yet feel sick when they were attacked? Louis hated peasants, too, apparently, and yet he had no problem sitting beside Jeanne - hoisting her in the air and dancing even. Jacob tried to turn this over in his head, around and around, like the cartwheels beneath him. But after a while, he gave up. People were too strange to understand, he decided. They were like life. And also that cheese. Too many things at once.

The world's evaluations of an individual's social worth, like the slits in my eyeballs, change with time and circumstance. In point of fact my pupil-slits vary but modestly between broad and narrow, but mankind's judgements turn somersaults and cartwheels for no conceivable reason.

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill. ("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes")

...Her eyes sparkle like she's about to cartwheel through a mosque.

My head is turning like a cartwheel; I thought that wine tasted strange.

A lady must attend her own engagement ball." Penny sat up straight. "Gabriel Duke. I know you did not just propose to me in the mews, without so much as going down on one knee, while my hair is a bird's nest and we both smell like goat." "I didn't propose to you." He swung his arms into his coat. Before disappearing, he gave her a slight, mischievous grin and a single syllable that had her heart cartwheeling in her chest. "Yet.

The first time my heart broke, I thought back to the day in my childhood when a piece of glass went through my finger after an ill-fated cartwheel. I was eleven years old. My mother and I were in our bathroom cleaning up the wound. She dribbled peroxide onto the cut. It fizzed and burned; I winced at the pain. It needs to burn so you know it’s healing, she explained. That small exchange during my adolescence helped me learn to appreciate the pain pulsating from my broken heart. In spite of the severity of my wound, I knew the healing process had already begun.

The world was turning cartwheels, Makepeace realized, and nobody was sure which was was up any more. Rules were breaking, but nobody was certain which ones. If you had enough confidence, you could walk in and at as if you knew what the new rules were, and other people would believe you.

It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

Like, Plato’s Symposium contains a story about soul mates: human beings were originally four-legged, four-armed, two-faced beings who had immense strength and were always cartwheeling around, perfectly content. To prevent these powerful humans from taking over, the gods split each human into two, who then wandered the earth looking for their soul mates. That is … the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

She never had to learn to live in a world that didn't necessarily want to go easy on her.

Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute.

Resiliency, like a cartwheel, requires core strength and a disregard for gravity. Only one of which can be willed.

She had a really odd expression on her face, as if the agony of the prophecy vision had suddenly popped and meerkats had come cartwheeling out of the cracked mountain instead of death.

Nineteen years since that day. Nineteen whole years! And I’m still looking for you. I will never stop looking for you. Often you appear when I expect it least. Earlier today I was trapped in some pointless dark thought or other, my body clenched like a metal fist. Then suddenly you were there: a bright autumn leaf cartwheeling over a dull pewter lawn. I uncurled and smelled life, felt dew on my feet, saw shades of green. I tried to grab hold of you, that vivid leaf, cavorting and wriggling and giggling. I tried to take your hand, look straight at you, but like an optical black spot you slid silently sideways, just out of reach. I will never stop looking for you.

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

This one was so lively and talkative, she paid no attention to him or his shyness, so he withdrew his feelers awkwardly and a little offended crawled back into himself like a snail brushed by a cartwheel.

I threw flips and cartwheels straight across the grass, fuck my imaginary stitches, fuck whether Lexie had done gymnastics, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this drunk and I loved it. I wanted to dive deeper into it and never come up for air, open my mouth and take a huge breath and drown on this night

He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that way quite a bit earlier, and spent their lives waiting for their bodies to match their souls.

Kai brings his son’s hand to his lips, peppering kisses on his palm, finally pulling a sweet giggle from the typically happy boy.  I’ve never thought about having kids before, but I’d be shocked to find a woman whose ovaries aren’t doing all sorts of cartwheels watching Kai Rhodes know exactly what to do to make his son feel better.

A beetle lumbered up onto her arm, and she stilled herself, enjoying the tickling feeling of its thread-thin feet. It was deep green with shimmers of blue and turquoise, with pitch-black legs. She kissed it very softly. If happiness were a color, it would be the color of this beetle, thought Wil.

Maybe this had been something like the colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, before words had ushered in vision - we do not see that which we have no language to understand.

Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine.

Really?” I whispered. He crossed his arms on his chest and stated, “Babe, you think I found the woman of my dreams at forty-five years old and I’m gonna let anything happen to her, think again. That’s a long fuckin’ time to wait for what you want. I waited. I found it. I’m pullin’ out all the stops to take care of it. I know you feel the same for me so I’m doin’ the same to keep me safe for you. So yeah, really, I called Delgado. I made peace and asked a favor. His woman is in your posse so she wouldn’t be doin’ cartwheels, he said no and something went down with you or, for you, me. And he isn’t dumb, he’s a man who knows to collect favors and he’s a man whose business means he often has the need to call markers. So his ear’s to the ground and his eyes are open so if a cop isn’t cruisin’ by your house or bakery, one of Lee’s boys or one of Hawk’s commandos are. Smart people pay attention to who’s cruisin’ around people they want to fuck with and smart people will see cops, Nightingale’s men and Delgado’s crazy motherfuckers and, my hope is, they’ll steer clear. So, there you go. Now you got a full explanation of what I mean when I say you’re on radar.” I heard all he said, I really did. But I was stuck at the beginning part where he told me I was the woman of his dreams.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

That's an applicable life less, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

By day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. They were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.

I mean, have you ever stopped to realize - not just the miracle that life is - but how basically comic it is despite its griefs? The wonder of it, as Amman Singh says, is that we take it so seriously. One day, poised on my tightrope, I hope to manage a glorious cartwheel, or at the very least a pirouette.

The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in you anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags in it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

You’re sure you want to do this,” Galen says, eyeing me like I’ve grown a tiara of snakes on my head. “Absolutely.” I unstrap the four-hundred-dollar silver heels and spike them into the sand. When he starts unraveling his tie, I throw out my hand. “No! Leave it. Leave everything on.” Galen frowns. “Rachel would kill us both. In our sleep. She would torture us first.” “This is our prom night. Rachel would want us to enjoy ourselves.” I pull the thousand-or-so bobby pins from my hair and toss them in the sand. Really, both of us are right. She would want us to be happy. But she would also want us to stay in our designer clothes. Leaning over, I shake my head like a wet dog, dispelling the magic of hairspray. Tossing my hair back, I look at Galen. His crooked smile almost melts me where I stand. I’m just glad to see a smile on his face at all. The last six months have been rough. “Your mother will want pictures,” he tells me. “And what will she do with pictures? There aren’t exactly picture frames in the Royal Caverns.” Mom’s decision to mate with Grom and live as his queen didn’t surprise me. After all, I am eighteen years old, an adult, and can take care of myself. Besides, she’s just a swim away. “She keeps picture frames at her house though. She could still enjoy them while she and Grom come to shore to-“ “Okay, ew. Don’t say it. That’s where I draw the line.” Galen laughs and takes off his shoes. I forget all about Mom and Grom. Galen, barefoot in the sand, wearing an Armani tux. What more could a girl ask for? “Don’t look at me like that, angelfish,” he says, his voice husky. “Disappointing your grandfather is the last thing I want to do.” My stomach cartwheels. Swallowing doesn’t help. “I can’t admire you, even from afar?” I can’t quite squeeze enough innocence in there to make it believable, to make it sound like I wasn’t thinking the same thing he was. Clearing his throat, he nods. “Let’s get on with this.” He closes the distance between us, making foot-size potholes with his stride. Grabbing my hand, he pulls me to the water. At the edge of the wet sand, just out of reach of the most ambitious wave, we stop. “You’re sure?” he says again. “More than sure,” I tell him, giddiness swimming through my veins like a sneaking eel. Images of the conference center downtown spring up in my mind. Red and white balloons, streamers, a loud, cheesy DJ yelling over the starting chorus of the next song. Kids grinding against one another on the dance floor to lure the chaperones’ attention away from a punch bowl just waiting to be spiked. Dresses spilling over with skin, matching corsages, awkward gaits due to six-inch heels. The prom Chloe and I dreamed of. But the memories I wanted to make at that prom died with Chloe. There could never be any joy in that prom without her. I couldn’t walk through those doors and not feel that something was missing. A big something. No, this is where I belong now. No balloons, no loud music, no loaded punch bowl. Just the quiet and the beach and Galen. This is my new prom. And for some reason, I think Chloe would approve.

Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.

She submitted to his embrace with the resignation of a person who has already planned to take away something enormous, and so has no trouble giving something trifling

Everybody should have someone whose belief in them is unwavering, unconditional, always.

Oh.' A syllable can express a great deal. Will's sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smell of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.

beneath the caged flutter of hope fear blooms in the liver as a spear where memory burns its fever across the spoke of my body

I haven't been so sure of anything since the time Mum asked me if I absolutely, definitely, certainly thought it was a good idea to practise doing cartwheels inside the house.

Three: You don't know what it's like Seven: To do a cartwheel followed by a somersault followed by wishing so hard you could fold your hands into a pistol and no longer exist.

It was my job to accidentally make money, and his job to make sure I didn't lose it while I was doing wobbly cartwheels in the parking lot after the bars closed.

It won’t matter if you turned cartwheels in bed for him and performed circusworthy stunts.

like a cartwheel over a hedgehog,

This was the elasticity and permanence of parental love; everything vile about your children was to some degree something vile about yourself, and disowning your child for their failings could only compound your own.

Shane stood up when he saw her, which made her heart turn cartwheels, and he pulled out her chair. Eve and Michael shared an amused look. "So cute," Eve said. When Shane glared, she smiled. "No, really. It is. Dude, chill.

He really is a first-class waste of space, isn't he ?" "Thank you" I said. It's nice when the people you love share your opinions. "You're welcome," Dad said. "And the cartwheels would seem to imply that the new model's a good thing ?" I looked at him with something close to shock. My father and I have a very satisfactory system in place, based on the unspoken agreement that I won't tell him about my love life and he won't ask. All that sort of carry-on is Mum's department, and she advises Dad on a need-to-know basis. "Um, yes," I said. "Very good," said Dad and, clearly appalled at having strayed so far into this emotional minefield, he began to brush his teeth with most unnecessary vigour.

My right foot hits the ground first, but my left one's gone AWOL, and I'm cartwheeling, my body mapped by local explosions of pain -- ankle, knee, elbow -- shit, my left ski's gone, whipped off, vamoosed -- ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky ground-woods-sky, a faceful of gravelly snow; dice in a tumbler; apples in a tumble dryer, a grunt, a groan, a plea, a shiiiiiiiiit ... [ ... ] Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain.

When you're little, you can't see all the walls, you know? You just see acres and acres of space, and it's all yours to run. You can do cartwheels and build forts and bury treasure to find later. But something happens when you get older. You start to see the walls. Maybe it's because you get taller or something. And then you see the cracks, you see how unstable it all is. And you try to test the walls' strength, and you pull a little chunk of it out, and pretty soon, all the sides tumble down, and then you're buried under all of it.

My parents had sent me on this journey to have adventures - small adventures, such as dining alone and trying out new foods, and bigger adventures with elves, a boy with no shoes, water sprites, Spellbinders, and dragons. They had sent me on this journey to hear my aunts tell stories about my parents themselves - reading Faery books, stealing cinnamon, eating spicy foods, turning cartwheels in forests - a basketful of memories to comfort me. Now I soared through the air, my heart glowing golden, and a thought flung itself at me. I have never been so happy.

Forgiveness was work, Eduardo told victims' families--but so, then, was love, and deciding what was right, and defending it. Recusing yourself from judgment so you won't be tainted by the aggressor's sin is the same as turning away from empathy so you won't be touched by the victim's pain.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough.”*

I counted his failings in my head: his obnoxious, cocky attitude; his pierced and painted wannabe girlfriend; his leather jacket and black motorcycle; his tattoos and multiple piercings. Even his name rankled. Dante. I’d spent my formative years dodging his type. I refused to be intimidated by him. That poncy lot. I seethed some more. And geeks? Surely he could come up with something more original. My entire year’s work depended on a successful outcome here, and Tristan had assured me this guy was the real deal, not just another charlatan. We only had two night’s use of the control tower. As of next week, it was scheduled for demolition. I’d convinced myself Dante was just a means to an end, and then he smiled at me, his hard, uncompromising face lighting up for just a second. With his sharp cheekbones and proud chin, he looked almost beautiful, and my stomach turned cartwheels. His eyes glittered like diamonds, pale silver that appeared luminous in the badly lit room.

I won't tell you everything she told me, for two reasons: because there's a good chance you'd die of boredom. She told me stories about my mother's first steps and the time she climbed into the barn loft and jumped out because she thought she could fly; about her hatred of sweet potatoes and her love of fresh honeycomb; about the perfect June evenings the Larson women spent watching her cartwheel and careen through the yard. Second, because they are each precious and painful to me in some secret way I can't explain, and I'm not ready to show them to anyone else yet. I want to hold them for a while in the quiet undercurrents of myself, until their edges are worn smooth as river stones.

There wasn't a single cell in our bodies that was the same as the day we were born, and yet we were still held responsible for everything all of our formers selves had ever done.

He regarded conversation as sport, and Lily loved anyone who regarded anything in life as sport (except for actual sports).

the things that go wrong are rarely the things you’ve thought to worry about.

And anyway, the anticipation was always worse than the thing itself - the anticipation and the memory, of course. And the anticipation of the memory was maybe the worst part of all.

When I roll my eyes, she just shakes her head like I couldn't possibly understand how important all this stuff is. And she's right - I don't. I don't think prancing around in short skirts repeating stupid rhymes, flashing their underwear to cheer on boys without doing so much as a cartwheel. It's the twenty-first century - shouldn't we be more evolved than this?

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.' 'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.' So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.

And, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven. Warren, who had grown up across the street from Marjorie, had long been "crazy about her." Sometimes she seemed to reciprocate his feeling with a faint gratitude, but she had tried him by her infallible test and informed him gravely that she did not love him. Her test was that when she was away from him she forgot him and had affairs with other boys.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

I was thrown together with Florence, or 'Florawns' as she was called, a pert girl of nineteen who worked in our kitchen and was sent out to help me. First, I followed her to a butcher where fat sausages hung from the ceiling like aldermen's chains, and I could choose the best of plump ducks, sides of beef, and chops standing guard like sentries on parade. Once the deal was done Florence paid him, gave me a wink and cast a trickle of coins into her apron pocket. So it seemed that serving girls will pay themselves the whole world over. The size of the Paris market made Covent Garden look like a tinker's tray. And I never before saw such neatness; the cakes arranged in pinks and yellows and greens like an embroidery, and the cheeses even prettier, some as tiny as thimbles and others great solid cartwheels. As for the King Cakes the French made for Twelfth Night, the scents of almond and caramelled sugar were to me far sweeter than any perfumed waters.

That's an applicable life lesson, my boy,' he'd said. 'Nobody is really paying attention to you. Most people don't really get this. They think they must count more to other people than other people count to them. They can't believe the disregard could truly be mutual.

I wasn’t even certain if my wings were meant for flight. I hadn’t exactly had any luck with it the one time I’d tried. I could glide, though. Probably. Maybe. Should worse come to worst, I could smoke up to them. Turn to dragon right there, dig my claws in, and hang on. That might do it. Looked like I was about to find out. What I hadn’t thought about, what I’d completely managed to forget about, was that I wasn’t exactly skilled at maintaining my transformed shape, either. The reminder came to me rather forcibly as I was streaming my way east, over the channel, and felt myself beginning to solidify. No. No! Yes. Several thousand feet up in the air, I Turned back into a girl. Screaming, cartwheeling, everything topsy-turvy purple as gravity reclaimed me and I plummeted down to the water. fly! sang the stars, weighing in past my screams. fly, beast! It was a damned near save. I was a girl and then I wasn’t, managing the Turn so close to the sea that the foam from the cresting waves splashed up through the smoke of me. Good thing I didn’t have a real heart just then. It would have stopped entirely.

Leta walked to the door and opened it with a ready smile for Colby Lane. And found herself looking straight into the eye of a man she hadn’t seen face-to-face in thirty-six years. Matt Holden matched her face against his memories of a young, slight, beautiful woman whose eyes loved him every time they looked at him. His heart spun like a cartwheel in his chest. “Cecily said it was Colby,” Leta said unsteadily. “Strange. She phoned me and asked if I was free this evening.” His broad shoulders shrugged and he smiled faintly. “I’m free every evening.” “That doesn’t sound like the life of a playboy widower,” Leta said caustically. “My wife was a vampire,” he said. “She sucked me dry of life and hope. Her drinking wore me down. Her death was a relief for both of us. Do I get to come in?” he added, glancing down the hall. “I’m going to collect dust if I stand out here much longer, and I’m hungry. A sack of McDonald’s hamburgers and fries doesn’t do a lot for me.” “I hear it’s a presidential favorite,” Cecily mused, joining them. “Come in, Senator Holden.” “It was Matt before,” he pointed out. “Or are you trying to butter me up for a bigger donation to the museum?” She shrugged. “Pick a reason.” He looked at Leta, who was uncomfortable. “Well, at least you can’t hang up on me here. You’ll be glad to know that our son isn’t speaking to me. He isn’t speaking to you, either, or so he said,” he added. “I suppose he won’t talk to you?” he added to Cecily. “He said goodbye very finally, after telling me that I was an idiot to think he’d change his mind and want to marry me just because he turned out to have mixed blood,” she said, not relating the shocking intimacy that had prefaced his remarks. “I’ll punch him for that,” Matt said darkly. “Ex-special forces,” Leta spoke up with a faint attempt at humor, nodding toward Matt. “He was in uniform when we went on our first date.” “You wore a white cotton dress with a tiered skirt,” he recalled, “and let your hair down. Hair…” He turned back to Cecily and grimaced. “Good God, what did you do that for?” “Tate likes long hair, that’s what I did it for,” she said, venom in her whole look. “I can’t wait for him to see it, even if I have to settle for sending him a photo!” “I hope you never get mad at me,” Matt said. “Fat chance.

Do you ever feel that way, though?” “What way?” “Like you could go back to some time that’s passed? Like you catch yourself thinking, why don’t I go there anymore, and why don’t I see those people and attend those parties, and then you remember it’s because that life is gone? And that you can’t?

But then, out of nowhere, Cletus said, “I guess we’re going to have to practice.” “Pardon me?” “Practice kissing. Like what you did with Billy.” I reeled back as my head whipped to the side, our eyes colliding. I couldn’t believe my ears. “You think . . . you want me to practice kissing with Billy?” “No. No. Absolutely not.” Again, Cletus’s gaze flickered over me. “I mean you and me. I’ll help you practice.” The heart flip returned, but this time it was more forceful than before. And it brought some friends—the tummy cartwheel, the throat cinch, and the chest ache. What. The. Hell . . .?

The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

SOPHIE HADN’T ASKED Physic what was in the sugary pink sedative, knowing the answer would probably make her not want to take it. So she wasn’t prepared for the interesting dreams. The second she crawled under her covers, she floated off to rainbow-glitterland, complete with kittens in tiaras and cartwheeling puppies and candy islands surrounded by twirling dolphins in tutus. Everything was so happy and sparkly and bright—it made her head spin and her stomach woozy. But maybe that was the point. To make her grateful to return to reality—even if it wasn’t nearly so cute. And to be glad to wake up and find people in her room, instead of dancing anthropomorphic animals.

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the backside of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what's coming to us, each day we're being paid pack for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration - we are owed, goddammit - and so we are expecting everything, everything.

At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into ‘Virgin Mary blue’, ‘blood of Christ red’, ‘Gethsemane green’, and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements and a guru.

At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St. Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into “Virgin Mary blue,” “blood of Christ red,” “Gethsemane green,” and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements, and a guru.

She waited for some time without hearing anything more: at last came a rumbling of little cart-wheels, and the sound of a good many voices all talking together: she made out the words: “Where’s the other ladder?—Why, I hadn’t to bring but one. Bill's got the other—Bill! Fetch it here, lad!—Here, put ’em up at this corner—No, tie ’em together first—they don't reach half high enough yet—Oh! they’ll do well enough. Don’t be particular—Here, Bill! catch hold of this rope—Will the roof bear?—Mind that loose slate—Oh, it’s coming down! Heads below!” (a loud crash)—“Now, who did that?—It was Bill, I fancy—Who’s to go down the chimney?—Nay, I shan’t! You do it!—That I wo’n’t, then!—Bill’s got to go down—Here, Bill! The master says you’ve got to go down the chimney!

As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.

He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk's tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.

No?” This was a matter of some interest to Lily; when she and Harold had broken up, they had solemnly vowed to stay friends. And why wouldn’t they? They were both young and resilient and had had their hearts broken two or three times already. But soon he’d taken up with a new girl—an accounting major, please!—who’d forbidden him ever to speak to Lily again. This she found crushing; she had very much wanted to stay friends with him, partly because being friends with ex-lovers seemed sophisticated and mature and continental, and partly because it seemed humane, and partly because she harbored a catastrophic fear of losing touch with anyone. It reminded her of death, and she was too easily reminded of death already. Then again, she knew that she had a more acute sense of the passage of time in general—and the swiftness of life, in particular—because of her dead sister, or almost-sister, or whatever. So she’d learned to forgive people their shortsightedness, and be happy for them that they’d lived the kinds of lives that would allow it.

Your mom probably wouldn't be too happy if you're dating someone who quit school." I laugh. "Nope, don't think so. But I do think she likes you." "Why do you say that?" he says, cocking his head at me. "When I called her, she told me to tell you good morning. And then she told me you were 'a keeper.'" She also said he was hot, which is a ten and a half on the creep-o-meter. "She won't think that when I start failing out of all my classes. I've missed too much school to give a convincing performance in that aspect." "Maybe you and I could do an exchange," I say, cringing at how many different ways that could sound. "You mean besides swapping spit?" I'm hyperaware of the tickle in my stomach, but I say, "Gross! Did Rachel teach you that?" He nods, still grinning. "I laughed for days." "Anyway, since you're helping me try to change, I could help you with your schoolwork. You know, tutor you. We're in all the same classes together, and I could really use the volunteer hours for my college application." His smile disappears as if I had slapped him. "Galen, is something wrong?" He unclenches his jaw. "No." "It was just a suggestion. I don't have to tutor you. I mean, we'll already be spending all day together in school and then practicing at night. You'll probably get sick of me." I toss in a soft laugh to keep it chit-chatty, but my innards feel as though they're cartwheeling. "Not likely." Our eyes lock. Searching his expression, my breath catches as the setting sun makes his hair shine almost purple. But it's the way each dying ray draws out silver flecks in his eyes that makes me look away-and accidentally glance at his mouth. He leans in. I raise my chin, meeting his gaze. The sunset probably deepens the heat on my cheeks to a strawberry red, but he might not notice since he can't seem to decide if he wants to look at my eyes or my mouth. I can smell the salt on his skin, feel the warmth of his breath. He's so close, the wind wafts the same strand of my hair onto both our cheeks. So when he eases away, it's me who feels slapped. He uproots the hand he buried in the sand beside me. "It's getting dark. I should take you home," he says. "We can do this again-I mean, we can practice again-tomorrow after school.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-​night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-​five, forty-​five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-​five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-​slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-​inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.” Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-​burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.