Edited Picture Quotes

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You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.
Haruki Murakami (After Dark)
In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
In a noisy place I can’t understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
Children who are visual thinkers will often be good at drawing, other arts, and building things with building toys such as Legos.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures...
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince (Firefly World Classic Fairy Tales Bilingual Picture Book) (English and Chinese Edition))
I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don’t know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Works (Halcyon Classics))
Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses. -James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz
James Lee Schmidt (liQUID PROse QUOtes)
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst ... said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley's money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way of getting to the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor's picture of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.
Philip K. Dick (Confessions of a Crap Artist)
Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of perfect mental health.
Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
And so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
since 1981 not a single film has won Best Picture without at least being nominated for Film Editing.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating — people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 'Uncensored' Edition & The Revised 1891 Edition)
I was also struck, when we walked together, by her seeming inability to feel some of the simplest emotions. “The mountains are pretty,” she said, “but they don’t give me a special feeling, the feeling you seem to enjoy … You look at the brook, the flowers, I see what great pleasure you get out of it. I’m denied that.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?
Tatsuya Ishida
Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it. More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary. Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (Collector's Edition): Including the Uncensored 13 Chapter Version & The Revised 20 Chapter Version)
murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
He was little more than a silhouette, a simplified portrait of a nobleman. A picture of what someone should be, not what they were.
V.E. Schwab (Shades of Magic Collector's Editions Boxed Set (Shades of Magic, #1-3))
never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
It is a comfortable thought, that the smallest and most turbid mud-puddle can contain its own picture of Heaven.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The American Notebooks: The Centenary Edition (Volume 8))
I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
There is nothing that art cannot express,
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.
Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism)
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow....
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
The ignorant Looker-on can't imagine what the Limner means by those seemingly rude Lines and Scrawls, which he intends for the Rudiments of a Picture, and the Figures of Mathematick Operation are Nonsense, and Dashes at a Venture, to one uninstructed in Mechanicks. We are in the Dark to one another's Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their Design, even to sagacious Inquisitors
Joseph Glanvill (Sadducismus triumphatus: or, a full and plain evidence, concerning witches and apparitions. In two parts. ... By Joseph Glanvil, ... The fourth edition, with additions.)
Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
As writers we are constantly editing our work. Sometimes we just have to let it go. Life is found more interesting within the imperfections of living rather than what we feel is picture perfect.
Elani Roman
But in the church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
When I arrived home from Boston, I realized there were no pictures on my mantel. I set down my suitcase and walked into the living room and looked across to the fireplace, and it felt empty. Empty of real stories. I went to my bedroom where the bed was made, and on my desk there were no pictures in frames and on the end tables there were no pictures. There was a framed picture of Yankee Stadium above the toilet in the bathroom, and there was some art I’d picked up in my travels, but there was little evidence of an actual character living an actual life. My home felt like a stage on which props had been set for a face story rather than a place where a person lived an actual human narrative. It’s an odd feeling to be awakened from a life of fantasy. You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living here, interacting with me, forcing me out of my daydreams. I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.
Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)
Feeling that Mommy is happy is a great boon to a child. Imagine for a moment a snapshot of Mother smiling and laughing. She’s happy to be here. She’s happy with you and anyone else in the picture, and she doesn’t need things to be any different than they are in that moment. She is relaxed! When Mommy is relaxed and smiling, we sense that her world is right. And when her world is right, then our world is right. But when Mommy is distracted or worried or depressed, we don’t have the same kind of support, and it’s harder for us to relax and be fully present. It doesn’t feel quite right to be expansive and expressive when Mommy is withdrawn or frazzled. There isn’t really a place to be happy, unless we’re putting on a happy face trying to cheer Mother up. Mother’s happiness relieves us of these burdens, and we can simply express ourselves as we are.
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?” So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing
Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Original 1865 Edition))
Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
The Tustin police seemed reluctant to publicise the racial implication of the crime. For instance, the Tustian Weekly omitted the words- I killed a jap- in their rendition of Lindberg's letter.' Wait, they did edit it. I don't get it. Why the hell would they do that?" "I am sorry" Junes looked up from the article. Margaret hold out a hand and placed it on top of his. He couldn't tell if it was trembling because his own hand was shaking pretty badly now. "Why are you sorry?" "Because you're Korean" "So?" "He was one of your people" Junseok snatched his hand away from her. Hequicklc shoved it under the table. "I'm Korean-American," he said. "But still" "Still what? This guy was Vietnamese. How is he one of my people?" "Well, both of you are Asians" Junseok stared back at her sincere eyes, then at his hand under the table. He wanted desperately to explain how non-sensical her comment was, but instead, he folded up the paper slowly and carefully. Tucking it under his arm, he got up , and whiteout saying anything to her, walked towards the exit. She called from behind, but he walked on, feeling the dirties expand inside him like a large flower. Each step quickened until he was running, running out the door and into the street, running past people and cars, running without the finest idea of what he was running from, to a place that he couldn't possibly picture in his mind.
Tablo (Pieces of You)
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.
George Orwell (Books v. Cigarettes)
That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious.
Steve Erickson (Zeroville)
Paper: Some inexpensive plain bond paper A pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper, 80 lb., 11" × 14" Pencils: A #2 ordinary yellow writing pencil with an eraser at the top A #4 drawing pencil—Faber-Castell, Prismacolor Turquoise, or other brand Marking pens: Sharpie (or other brand) fine point non-permanent black A second marker, fine point permanent black Graphite stick: #4 General’s is a good brand, or other brand Pencil sharpener: A small handheld sharpener is fine Erasers: A Pink Pearl eraser A Staedtler Mars white plastic eraser A kneaded eraser—Lyra, Design, or other brand Masking tape: 3M Scotch Low Tack Artist Tape Clips: Two 1-inch-wide black clips Drawing board: A firm surface large enough to hold your 11" × 14" drawing paper—about 15" × 18" is a good size. This can be improvised from a kitchen cutting board, a piece of foam board, a piece of Masonite, or thick cardboard. Picture plane: This too can be improvised using an 8" × 10" piece of glass (you will need to tape the edges), or an 8" × 10" piece of clear plastic, about 1⁄16" thick. Viewfinders: You will make these from black paper—“construction” paper is a good thickness, or you could use thin black cardboard. You will find instructions for making the viewfinders here A small mirror: About 5" × 7" that can be taped to a wall, or any available wall mirror.
Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive Edition)
How about I tell you what I don't like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be - basically gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mashups a la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and cross breeding rarely results in anything satisfying... I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred and fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and - I imagine this goes without saying - vampires.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
Pictures couldn't tell the whole story anyway. That was the other thing about them - they were always a carefully edited glimpse, a story out of context.
Sarah Ockler (The Book of Broken Hearts)
Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.
Oscar Wilde (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (illustrated, complete, and unabridged 1891 edition))
Inaccrochable - A picture a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either. -said by Gertrude Stein
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
My mother: the perfect picture of guardian excellence and decorum. My father: always capable of achieving his goals, no matter how twisted the means. Uneasily, I began to understand how I'd inherited my bizarre personality. Mead, Richelle (2010-12-07). Last Sacrifice: A Vampire Academy Novel (Kindle Locations 2836-2838). Penguin Young Readers Group. Kindle Edition.
Richelle Mead (Last Sacrifice (Vampire Academy, #6))
There are one or two people I’m fond of, and there’s a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn’t live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D’you care at all for first editions? I’ve got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can’t afford to give what they ask.
Virginia Woolf (Night And Day)
But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
Realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
Because it's like seeing us naked." Whoa. Hearing Tristan utter the word naked was hot. Don't start picturing him naked. Raveling, Emma (2011-09-16). Whirl (Ondine Quartet Book 1) (p. 189). Mandorla Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Emma Raveling (Whirl (Ondine Quartet, #1))
But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)—competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.
Joseph A. Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: Second Edition Text)
His psychic wounds presented a more complicated challenge. Something was needed in addition to the autonomic remedies provided by dreams, shaking, weeping, hollering, sweating, and vomiting. For true recovery -- involution -- Blake required satisfactory relations with other creatures over extended periods of time, and lots and lots of rest ... Blake could sometimes imagine what a reasonably balanced state of mind would be like. He could almost picture a less haunted edition of himself, sense an inheritance that might come due someday.
David Rhodes (Jewelweed)
Sometimes bygone springs, full of warmth and scents, blossom yet again inside us. And we carry them through the winter, protecting them with our chests. Then, one day, those bygone springs begin protecting our chests from the frost when we find ourselves on the other side of the window, where winter is not just a picture. It is now the ninth winter that I have had such a spring inside me, and it is still keeping me warm. Imagine, in this winter, two such springs touching like the scents of two meadows. That is what we need instead of overcoats. . .
Milorad Pavić (Dictionary of the Khazars - Androgynous Edition)
I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (Original 1891 Edition): Annotated)
A man fishes for two reasons: he’s either sport fishing or fishing to eat, which means he’s either going to try to catch the biggest fish he can, take a picture of it, admire it with his buddies and toss it back to sea, or he’s going to take that fish on home, scale it, fillet it, toss it in some cornmeal, fry it up, and put it on his plate. This, I think, is a great analogy for how men seek out women. See, men are, by nature, hunters, and women have been put in the position of being the prey. Think about it: it used to be that a man “picked” a wife, a man “asked” a woman to dinner, a man had to get “permission” from a woman’s father to have her hand in marriage, and even, in some cases, to date her. We pursued—in fact, we’ve been taught all our lives that it was not only a good thing to chase women, but natural. Women have bought into this for years, too; how many times have you or one of your girls said, “I like it when a man pursues me,” or “I need him to romance me and give me flowers and make me feel like I’m wanted”? Flowers, jewelry, phone calls, dates, sweet talk—these are all the weapons in our hunting arsenal when we’re coming for you. But the question always remains: once we hook you, what will we do with you? Taking a cue from my love
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Expanded Edition: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
Beautiful,” Jake whispered. “The pictures could never hold you. This is mine; this is what I was trying to find.” “Now that it’s found,” Aaron replied as his fingers combed through Jake’s hair, “don’t lose it again.” Ellis, Giselle (2010-02-23). Take My Picture (Kindle Locations 1646-1648). Dreamspinner Press. Kindle Edition.
Giselle Ellis
Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing—that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely to be a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But they may also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader.
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out. They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to the whole. The nucleus would oscillate. In one of its many random modes of oscillation it might elongate. Since the strong force operates only over extremely short distances, the electric force repelling the two bulbs of an elongated drop would gain advantage. The two bulbs would push farther
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
arms went around his neck and back until their bodies were nothing more than a tangle of limbs that were too entwined to claim a single owner but were rather an extension of this new sweating, grunting, fucking creature they had created. Ellis, Giselle (2010-02-23). Take My Picture (Kindle Locations 1717-1719). Dreamspinner Press. Kindle Edition.
Giselle Ellis
[Paul Olum] was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of [Richard] Feynman’s death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. “My wife died three years ago, also of cancer,” he said. ... I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick’s books and other things of Dick’s. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pictures of Dick on them. The article in Science about the Challenger episode. And also some of the recent books. I get a terrible feeling every time I look at them. How could someone like Dick Feynman be dead? This great and wonderful mind. This extraordinary feeling for things and ability is in the ground and there’s nothing there anymore. It’s an awful feeling. And I feel it—— A lot of people have died and I know about it. My parents are both dead and I had a younger brother who is dead. But I have this feeling about just two people. About my wife and about Dick. I suppose, although this wasn’t quite like childhood, it was graduate students together, and I do have more—— I don’t know, romantic, or something, feelings about Dick, and I have trouble realizing that he’s dead. He was such an extraordinarily special person in the universe. Gleick, James (2011-02-22). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Jame Gleick quoting Paul Olum
But if they are serious, then my job is to be solely responsible for the running of all aspects of the resort and I’ll have to liaise with the head office and provide weekly reports. I’ve never had to “liaise” before. It sounds sexy and dangerous. Any job that tells me that I have to “liaise” with the big boys in the head office is a winner to me. I can picture myself all dolled up in a cocktail dress at a work “do” standing in a circle with the other “suits” speaking in hushed tones about graphs and pie charts and financial reports. If people ask us what we’re doing, I can say dismissively, “Oh don’t mind us, we’re just liaising…” Ahern, Cecelia (2005-02-01). Love, Rosie (pp. 173-174). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Cecelia Ahern (Love, Rosie)
Twentieth Century Fox commissioned a screenplay of Bobby Kennedy’s book. Budd Schulberg, the celebrated writer of On the Waterfront, wrote the screenplay, but the project was abandoned by the studio. Columbia Pictures then expressed interest in picking up the project but abandoned it as well. In an introduction he wrote to a 1972 book written about Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy’s chief aide, Walter Sheridan, Budd Schulberg explained why the two studios abandoned the project: “A labor tough walked right into the office of the new head of [Twentieth Century Fox] to warn him that if the picture was ever made [Teamster] drivers would refuse to deliver the prints to the theaters. And if they got there by any other means, stink bombs would drive out the audiences.” This
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
In making practical application of the material covered in this book to everyday solutions, it will be helpful to keep the following underlying themes in mind: Peace of mind is our single goal. Forgiveness is our single function and the way to achieve our goal of peace of mind. Through forgiveness, we can learn not to judge others and to see everyone, including ourselves, as guiltless. We can let go of fear when we stop judging and stop projecting the past into the future, and live only in the now. We can learn to accept direction from our inner intuitive voice, which is our guide to knowing. After our inner voice gives us direction, it will also provide the means for accomplishing whatever is necessary. In following one’s inner guidance, it is frequently necessary to make a commitment to a specific goal even when the means for achieving it are not immediately apparent. This is a reversal of the customary logic of the world, and can be thought of as “putting the cart before the horse.” We do have a choice in determining what we perceive and the feelings we experience. Through retraining of the mind we can learn to use positive active imagination. Positive active imagination enables us to develop positive, loving motion pictures in our minds.
Gerald G. Jampolsky (Love Is Letting Go of Fear, Third Edition)
And before either one could breathe another breath or utter another “yes,” Jake finally found out how Aaron looked as he came, finally saw the glazed look that slid over those brown eyes, finally saw the beauty that he had always known existed in this world but had never been able to find. Finally knew his Aaron. Bare, flushed, breathless, and slick beneath him. Ellis, Giselle (2010-02-23). Take My Picture (Kindle Locations 1736-1739). Dreamspinner Press. Kindle Edition.
Giselle Ellis
A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.
Tobias Smollett (The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions))
the hub, it would allow the portable devices to become simpler. A lot of the functions that the devices tried to do, such as editing the video or pictures, they did poorly because they had small screens and could not easily accommodate menus filled with lots of functions. Computers could handle that more easily. And one more thing . . . What Jobs also saw was that this worked best when everything—the device, computer, software, applications, FireWire—was all tightly integrated. “I became even more of a believer in providing end-to-end
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition))
Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
She could almost feel the wave of energy coming off of him as he moved with the wheel and thought if Jake wanted to photograph blatant sex, all he had to do was turn to his right and snap a few of Aaron. Neither one was paying the slightest bit of attention to the other, but Alyson was certain she could see a strand of nearly invisible light connecting them. She stared at them and thought that if she had a pair of those giant novelty scissors they used to cut red ribbons at the openings of new businesses, she could walk over and sever that connection with one snap of her shears and Jake and Aaron would crash to the floor like puppets shorn of their strings. Ellis, Giselle 2010-02-23. Take My Picture (Kindle Locations 638-643). Dreamspinner Press. Kindle Edition.
Giselle Ellis
As a commissioner (delegate) to the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly in 1845, Thornwell wrote to his wife, “I have no doubts but that the Assembly, by a very large majority, will declare slavery not to be sinful, will assert that it is sanctioned by the word of God, that it is purely a civil relation with which the Church, as such, has no right to interfere, and that abolitionism is essentially wicked, disorganizing, and ruinous.”7 In an 1850 sermon Thornwell painted a clear picture that Christians supported slavery and atheists opposed it: “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”8
Jack Rogers (Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, Revised and Expanded Edition: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church)
... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...
Philippe Jullian (The symbolists)
Crying is therapeutic Most people can relate to the calming and stress reducing effect of a “good cry.” Grieving children should be supported in their need to cry. Unfortunately, children sometimes suppress their tears, thinking that they can control their pain if they control their crying. Parents may find their child’s pain very stressful or threatening and may therefore knowingly or unknowingly suppress natural expressions of grief. They may try to distract the child by promising a treat if he stops crying; cutting the feelings short (“Hush, hush”); minimizing the feelings (“You’re OK now”); contradicting his reality (“You’re going to love it here”); criticizing (“Stop making such a fuss”); embarrassing (“You’re too big to act like such a baby”); or threatening (“Stop it right now or I’ll give you something to cry about”). Crying should be supported with empathy and nurturing. It might be helpful to say something like, “I can tell that you are feeling very bad. Maybe it is because we were just looking at pictures of Nana, and you’re thinking about her now and missing her. Let’s sit here together for a while and I’ll rub your back.” Don’t rush the toddler’s grief before she is ready to let go of it. When the crying has subsided, offer a cold glass of juice or a walk outside. Often, children are more receptive to being cuddled, making eye contact, and other attachment strategies after an episode of acute sadness.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)