Delicate Edible Birds Quotes

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.

Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.

On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.

We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.

I never sleep late, and I know what this means: the worst cowards are the ones who refuse to look at what they fear.

But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who'd picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was human to everyone but me. When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell. And, after that: Hallelujah.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

There is no ending, no neatness... where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.

I loved books like people; I liked real people less.

Famous people consume us because we are bored.

Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says.

Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions--how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.

I like to think it's a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.

The culture's reverence for nature accentuates Kyoto's innate beauty. Designs on fabric, pottery, lacquer, and folding screens depict swirling water, budding branches, and birds in flight. Delicate woodcuts and scrolls celebrate the moonlight, rain, and snow. Elegant restaurant dishes arrive with edible garnishes of seasonal flora.

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.

in his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is

Grief is becoming a stranger to oneself.

It's okay, she said, taking his fingers out of her nose. You can be ugly. You're a boy. He let out a cackle, as if agreeing, then the sick feeling returned to her. Girl things were beautiful. Beauty was girl things.

I imagined myself as a beautiful Cassandra, wandering vast and lonely halls, spilling prophecies that everyone laughed at, only to watch them come tragically true in the end. This feeling of mutedness, of injustice, was particularly strong in me, though I had no particular prophecies to tell, no clear-sighted warnings.

She felt as if all her life she'd been carrying this black sack filled with cobras, and the red-headed boy had swept it from her hands and given her a different one, filled with something soft, and said, Listen, this, too, is yours, and you can have it, and didn't you know there are millions of different things to carry in the world, darling?

In her every small movement she was the woman of the future, a type that would swagger and curse, fall headlong, flaming into the hell of war, be as brave and tough as men, take the overflowing diarrhea of nervous frontline troops without grimacing, speak loudly and devastatingly, kick brain matter off their shoes and go unhurriedly on. When he looked at Bern, Viktor saw the future, and it was lovely and clean and as equal as things between men and women, between prole and patrician, could be.