Chalet Girl Quotes

You did respond—your response was the worst kind—you did nothing.

I used to think you could only grieve for things you'd actually lost.

It was only in the mid-1970s, after Ted Bundy started abducting and killing middle-class white college girls at schools, shopping malls, ski chalets, national parks and public beaches, that the media suddenly began paying close attention.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

It seems there are some problems even Prosecco and cake can't make better.

Scarlett Mistry supposed there were natural disasters everywhere. But it was all so very inconvenient. When she was a child, her father had gone apoplectic over a hurricane that had flattened one of their multi-million-dollar high-rises in Miami Beach. A landslide in Vail had once collapsed the roof of a Mistry Hotels chalet. And her mother was constantly threatening to sell off the property in New Orleans before the levees gave way for good. Even in her family's native Gujarat, India, there were terrible floods when the monsoons came. Property was a risky way to make a living, in Scarlett's opinion - not that she'd ever say as much to her parents. She'd long ago decided on an alternative route to fame and fortune, one free from the uncertainty of climate change and its unpredictable effect on the real estate market. Unfortunately, she hadn't factored in power outages. So instead of being able to check any of her feeds, she was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten. He wasn't big on details, that Vaughn Green. Not that Scarlett needed Vaughn's opinion on how screwed they all were. After all, she was spending the afternoon sitting under a quilt by a fire like some sort of pioneer girl.

What would have happened, I wondered, if Clover and Jotter never ran the river—if they had listened to the critics and doomsayers, or to their own doubts? They brought knowledge, energy, and passion to their botanical work, but also a new perspective. Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs. They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake. They knew every saltbush twig and stickery cactus was, in its own way, as much a marvel as Boulder Dam—shaped to survive against all the odds. In the United States, half of all bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics go to women, yet these women go on to earn only 74 percent of a man’s salary in those fields. A recent study found that it will be another two decades before women and men publish papers at equal rates in the field of botany, a field traditionally welcoming to women. It may take four decades for chemistry, and three centuries for physics. Stereotypes linger of scientists as white-coated, wild-haired men, and they limit the ways in which young people envision their futures. In a famous, oft-replicated study, 70 percent of six-year-old girls, asked to draw a picture of a scientist, draw a woman, but only 25 percent do so at the age of sixteen.