“
We?" Simon looked at him in disbelief. "Are you ever going home?"
"What, bored with my company already?"
"Let me ask you something," Simon said. "Do you find me fascinating to be around?"
"What was that?" Jace said. "Sorry, I think I fell asleep for a moment. Do, continue with whatever mesmerizing thing you were saying.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4))
“
So why do they call it the crease?” Dex asks in fascination after the second period commences. “And why does it sound so dirty?” On my other side, Allie leans in to grin at Dexter. “Babe, everything about hockey sounds dirty. Five-hole? Poke check? Backdoor?” She sighs. “Come home with me one time and listen to my dad yell Jam it in! over and over again when he watches hockey, and then you can talk to me about dirty. Not to mention uncomfortable.
”
”
Elle Kennedy (The Deal (Off-Campus, #1))
“
He sat in disbelief as the Mission Possible continued its rocking motion farther out to nowhere. He could hear the metronomic slap, slap, slap of water against the boat’s hull. He checked his watch, turned his Yankees cap around, and started the engines. Taking one last look around, he turned the bow of the Bertram back toward shore. Ready or not, it was time for Jake Reid to go home.
”
”
Chad Boudreaux (Scavenger Hunt)
“
I’ll check on you when I get home. I love you, baby. (Kiefer)
I love you too, Daddy. (Kiara)
What the hell was that action? (Syn)
I think it’s something called ‘paternal concern.’ (Nykyrian)
What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth. (Syn)
No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny. (Nykyrian)
Get the fuck out. No way. You’re screwing with my head again, aren’t you? (Syn)
No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up. (Nykyrian)
Yeah but it’s really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What’s next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals? (Syn)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Born of the Night (The League, #1))
“
That journal entry is fascinating, but all wrong. I was at home when you called that night. And I broke every speed limit to get to you.
”
”
Elsie Silver (Wild Love (Rose Hill, #1))
“
Other people's houses were always fascinating. As soon as you went through the door for the first time, you got the feel of the atmosphere, and so discovered something about the personalities of the people who lived there.
”
”
Rosamunde Pilcher (Coming Home)
“
It's fascinating. Did you know that Moanin' Lisa failed Home Ec last year? It proves the point, bro. You can't turn a hoe into a housewife.
”
”
J.M. Darhower
“
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
”
”
Dagobert D. Runes
“
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
”
”
Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel)
“
An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.
”
”
Christopher Isherwood (Exhumations)
“
Simon. “So, the gig’s at nine, right? What do we do with the rest of the day?”
“We?” Simon looked at him in disbelief. “Are you ever going home?”
“What, bored with my company already?”
“Let me ask you something,” Simon said. “Do you find me fascinating to be around?”
“What was that?” Jace said. “Sorry, I think I fell asleep for a moment. Do, continue with whatever mesmerizing thing you were saying.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4))
“
When I wasn't at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and though no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating....By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history.
”
”
Julia Child (My Life in France)
“
We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
Are you ever going home?"
"What, bored with my company already?"
"Let me ask you something," Simon said. "do you find me fascinating to be around?"
"What was that?" Jace said. "Sorry, i think I fell asleep for a moment. Do, continue with whatever mesmerizing thing you were saying.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4))
“
This wasn’t what she expected. Never, in her wildest dreams. This... this was the Blood Queen of Garbhán Isle? Scourge of the Madron lands? Destroyer of Villages? Demon Killer of Women and Children? She who had blood pacts with the darkest of gods? This was Annwyl the Bloody?
Talaith watched, fascinated, as Annwyl held onto Morfyd the Witch’s wrists. Morfyd — the Black Witch of Despair, Killer of the Innocent, Annihilator of Souls, and all around Mad Witch of Garbhán Isle or so she was called on the Madron lands — had actually tried to sneak up on Annwyl to put ointment on the nasty wound the queen had across her face. But as soon as the warrior saw her, she squealed and grabbed hold of her. Now Annwyl lay on her back, Morfyd over her, trying her best to get Annwyl to stop being a ten year old.
“If you just let me—”
“No! Get that centaur shit away from me, you demon bitch!”
“Annwyl, I’m not letting you go home to my brother looking like that. You look horrific.”
“He’ll have to love me in spite of it. Now get off!”
...
“Ow!”
“Crybaby.”
No, this isn’t what Talaith expected. Annwyl the Blood Queen was supposed to be a vicious, uncaring warrior bent on revenge and power. She let her elite guard rape and and pillage wherever they went, and she used babies as target practice while their mothers watched in horror. That’s what she was supposed to be and that’s what Talaith expected to find. Instead, she found Annwyl. Just Annwyl. A warrior who spent most of her resting time reading or mooning over her consort. She was silly, charming, very funny, and fiercely protective of everyone. Her elite guard, all handpicked by Annwyl, were sweet, vicious fighters and blindingly loyal to their queen.
”
”
G.A. Aiken (About a Dragon (Dragon Kin, #2))
“
All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home.
”
”
Henry Miller (The Cosmological Eye)
“
Same old boring boring story America can’t stop telling itself. What is this sicko fascination? Every book and movie practically has to have a little, right? But why do you think all those runaways are on the streets tearing up their veins with junk and selling themselves so they can sleep in the gutter? What do you think the alternative was at home?
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold)
“
Of course we have a Tomorrow on the map…located east of Today and west of Yesterday…and we have no end of "times" in fairyland. Spring-time, long time, short time, new-moon time, good-night time, next time…but no last time, because that is too sad a time for fairyland; old time, young time…because if there is an old time there ought to be a young time, too; mountain time…because that has such a fascinating sound; night-time and day-time…but no bed-time or school-time; Christmas-time; no only time, because that also is too sad…but lost time, because it is so nice to find it; some time, good time, fast time, slow time, half-past kissing-time, going-home time, and time immemorial…which is one of the most beautiful phrases in the world.
”
”
L.M. Montgomery
“
It's no wonder I was so fascinated. The kind of home I imagine--one that offers stability and encouragement and the space to learn and grow as an individual--is a luxury I never had growing up.
”
”
Samra Habib (We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir)
“
...This is a place of learning where very few learn anything of value. That you, who have courage and intelligence, are held in contempt by most of your kind here because you have no sorcery... I have seen you protect others, though they consider you to be weaker than they. I have seen a very few decent people, like the boy we took from the tower. I have seen women trade pleasure for coin to feed their children, and others do the same so that they could ignore their children while making themselves foolish with wines and powders. I have seen men who labor as long as the sun is up go home to wives who hold them in contempt for never being there. I have seen men beat and use those whom they should protect, even their own children. I have seen your kind place others of their own in slavery. I have seen them fighting to be free of the same. I have seen men of the law betray it, men who hate the law be kind. I have seen gentle defenders, sadistic healers, creators of beauty scorned while craftsmen of destruction are worshiped. Your Kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.
”
”
Jim Butcher (Academ's Fury (Codex Alera, #2))
“
In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.
”
”
Marjorie Pay Hinckley (Small and Simple Things)
“
[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]
One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
”
”
Jürgen Habermas
“
Once you start opening your mind to the wonders of the kitchen, once you start asking what’s really going on inside your food while you cook it, you’ll find that the questions keep coming and coming, and that the answers will become more and more fascinating.
”
”
J. Kenji López-Alt (The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science)
“
Need a ride home?"
"Yes."
But she keeps sitting there.
"Let's go."
"You're taking me?"
"It's a pretty standard way of offering," I say. "I wasn't asking for informational purposes. Fascinating as the answer was.
”
”
Ingrid Paulson
“
I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and
coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
”
”
Sylvia Plath
“
We’ve fallen for the devil’s lie. His most basic strategy, the same one he employed with Adam and Eve, is to make us believe that sin brings fulfillment. However, in reality, sin robs us of fulfillment. Sin doesn’t make life interesting; it makes life empty. Sin doesn’t create adventure; it blunts it. Sin doesn’t expand life; it shrinks it. Sin’s emptiness inevitably leads to boredom. When there’s fulfillment, when there’s beauty, when we see God as he truly is—an endless reservoir of fascination—boredom becomes impossible.
”
”
Randy Alcorn (Heaven: A Comprehensive Guide to Everything the Bible Says About Our Eternal Home)
“
So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they're children, it's not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can't say over the dinner table, 'I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it." That's why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate in some way to each other's work.
”
”
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
“
Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can’t think why or where she would run to.
”
”
Jude Morgan (The Taste of Sorrow)
“
There is something about picking up a book you've never seen before, reading the blurb on its back cover and knowing that you could possibly enter a whole new fascinating world if you took that book home. And in a bookshop or library, this possibility feels infinite.
”
”
Vivian Teo (My BFF Is an Alien)
“
Dedication To all who now, or have ever, called Michigan home. Its natural, glimmering beauty and fascinating history had me stuck in an almost permanent daydream. It is easy to love a place with so much magic.
”
”
Alexandria V. Nolan (Starlight Symphonies of Oak and Glass: A Novel of the Great Lakes)
“
Books were a healthy drug. They could sweep me away from storms, make me forget bruises, and soothe any emotional ache, if only for a moment. History was full of fascinating tales of guts and glory, each one a vacation I could afford.
”
”
Cara Dee (Home (Camassia Cove, #1))
“
I'm just as ambitious as ever. Only I've changed the object of my ambitions. I'm going to be a good teacher- and I'm going to study at home here and take a little college course all by myself. Oh, I've dozens of plans Marilla. I've been thinking them out for a week and I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queens my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see ti along for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own that bind, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes - what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows - what new landscapes- what new beauties - what curves and hills and valley's further on.
”
”
L.M. Montgomery (Anne Of Green Gables)
“
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Anathem)
“
Moloka'i. It was not a name spoken lightly in these islands. Sometimes it was called “Moloka'i of the potent prayers,” known for centuries as the home of powerful sorcerers capable of praying men to death, of sending giant fireballs hurtling across the sea, fiery planets of destruction seeking out hapless victims. Today the island was still an object of fear and fascination; but for very different reasons.
”
”
Alan Brennert (Moloka'i (Moloka'i, #1))
“
Also, my collection is growing. So far I have infiltrated four hundred homes and pillaged every sock I can find. I cannot explain my fascination with these delightful foot blankets, I can only tell you that it pleases me to carry them around while yowling like my fur is on fire.
”
”
Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom, #1))
“
So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they're children, it's not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can't say over the dinner table, 'I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it.' That's why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate in some way to each other's work.
”
”
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
“
You know the people who think seeing it in a picture is like seeing it in real life? Well, it’s not. Because when you’re there, you’re not just seeing it. It’s the sounds, the smells of Paris, the way the air feels on your skin, the way the wine tastes different when you drink it from Parisian glasses while sitting in a wicker chair outside a café on a cobblestone street. You can’t re-create the hum of a foreign language being spoken over and over itself. It sounds like music. The way the sun rises and sets, the shadows on the buildings, the car horns honking in the distance. It’s all different, new, and fascinating to experience when you travel far away from home.
”
”
Renee Carlino (Wish You Were Here)
“
Eli was fascinated by kitchens. By the way people ordered their lives, the cabinets they used, the places they kept food, and the food they choose to keep. He’d spent the last decade studying people, and it was amazing how much could be gleaned from their homes. Their bedrooms, and bathrooms, and closets, of course, but also their kitchens.
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (Vicious (Villains, #1))
“
A good woman inspires a man. A brilliant woman interests him. A beautiful woman fascinates him. But a sensually empowered one gets him.
”
”
Lebo Grand
“
Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him.
Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked.
Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.
”
”
Heinrich Harrer (Seven Years in Tibet)
“
One of the most outgoing and affectionate of all cat breeds, the rare and beautiful Turkish Angora has a fascinating history...Elegant, finely-boned creatures, Turkish Angoras are graceful, energetic and usually the first to welcome visitors into your home. It is also not unusual for a pet Turk to act as the “host” at a party or other gathering, inspecting and interacting with every guest.
”
”
Cat Fanciers' Association Inc.
“
She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.
”
”
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
“
When Gabriel was about Ivo's age," the duchess remarked almost dreamily, staring out at the plum-colored sky, "he found a pair of orphaned fox cubs in the woods, at a country manor we'd leased in Hampshire. Has he told you about that?"
Pandora shook her head, her eyes wide.
A reminiscent smile curved the duchess's full lips. "It was a pair of females, with big ears, and eyes like shiny black buttons. They made chirping sounds, like small birds. Their mother had been killed in a poacher's trap, so Gabriel wrapped the poor th-things in his coat and brought them home. They were too young to survive on their own. Naturally, he begged to be allowed to keep them. His father agreed to let him raise them under the gamekeeper's supervision, until they were old enough to return the f-forest. Gabriel spent weeks spoon-feeding them with a mixture of meat paste and milk. Later on, he taught them to stalk and catch prey in an outside pen."
"How?" Pandora asked, fascinated.
The older woman glanced at her with an unexpectedly mischievous grin. "He dragged dead mice through their pen on a string."
"That's horrid," Pandora exclaimed, laughing.
"It was," the duchess agreed with a chuckle. "Gabriel pretended not to mind, of course, but it was qu-quite disgusting. Still, the cubs had to learn." The duchess paused before continuing more thoughtfully. "I think for Gabriel, the most difficult part of raising them was having to keep his distance, no matter how he loved them. No p-petting or cuddling, or even giving them names. They couldn't lose their fear of humans, or they wouldn't survive. As the gamekeeper told him, he might as well murder them if he made them tame. It tortured Gabriel, he wanted to hold them so badly."
"Poor boy."
"Yes. But when Gabriel finally let them go, they scampered away and were able to live freely and hunt for themselves. It was a good lesson for him to learn."
"What was the lesson?" Pandora asked soberly. "Not to love something he knew he would lose?"
The duchess shook her head, her gaze warm and encouraging. "No, Pandora. He learned how to love them without changing them. To let them be what they were meant to be.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Spring (The Ravenels, #3))
“
I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the Five and Ten.
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
“
She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.
”
”
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
“
Of course, it was a lie, and that bald man in a blue suit was definitely harassing her, teasing her with dirty, rude jokes. Nothing physical from the body of a High Grade can heal. No matter if it’s blood or sperm or saliva or even a discarded hair or nail—as some fraudulent religious groups claim, taking advantage of Low Grades’ fascination with the living gods among them. Though, the archive mentions a however as a footnote:
***However, when they pass strong prana (the energy controllable by the evolved, High Grade humans) to the sick or wounded, it heals, no matter whether they are plants or animals. Their prana flows strongly when they feel strong emotions. Some people say their sperm heals, but it’s not the semen. It’s the strong prana-boosts the High Grades experience when they reach climax during intimacy …
Kusha felt a tinge of pride, exponentially multiplied by her Low-Grade inferiority complex, reading this footnote. It worsened when ads started coming up on her HOME page after reading it. The ads had horrible titles:
Dream Youth For The Low Grades.
Alternate Longevity.
A Secret Pleasurable Way To Youth.
Get Your Dream Citizenship With Pleasing Pleasure Contract.
The last one is for non-citizens, of course. At least, she’s a citizen. But when Kusha discovered how many unevolved men and women enter such contracts just for citizenship, it made her face crease. As if she’d caught a nasty smell. For a moment, she even thought, she hated every High Grade in the world, including everyone in her adoptive family. Right now, standing in front of Meera, the hatred swells.
”
”
Misba (The Oldest Dance (Wisdom Revolution, #2))
“
You don’t know,” Anthony said, his voice low and nearly shaking with rage. “You don’t know what he has done.”
“No more than what you have done, I’m sure,” Violet said slyly.
“Precisely!” Anthony roared. “Good God, I know exactly what is going on in his brain right now, and it has nothing to do with poetry and roses.”
Simon pictured laying Daphne down on a bed of rose petals. “Well, maybe roses,” he murmured.
“I’m going to kill him,” Anthony announced.
“These are tulips, anyway,” Violet said primly, “from Holland. And Anthony, you really must summon control of your emotions. This is most unseemly.”
“He is not fit to lick Daphne’s boots.”
Simon’s head filled with more erotic images, this time of himself licking her toes. He decided not to comment.
Besides, he had already decided that he wasn’t going to allow his thoughts to wander in such directions. Daphne was Anthony’s sister, for God’s sake. He couldn’t seduce her.
“I refuse to listen to another disparaging word about his grace,” Violet stated emphatically, “and that is the end of the subject.”
“But—”
“I don’t like your tone, Anthony Bridgerton!”
Simon thought he heard Daphne choke on a chuckle, and he wondered what that was all about.
“If it would please Your Motherhood,” Anthony said in excruciatingly even tones, “I would like a private word with his grace.”
“This time I’m really going to get that vase,” Daphne announced, and dashed from the room.
Violet crossed her arms, and said to Anthony, “I will not have you mistreat a guest in my home.”
“I shan’t lay so much as a hand on him,” Anthony replied. “I give you my word.”
Having never had a mother, Simon was finding this exchange fascinating. Bridgerton House was, after all, technically Anthony’s house, not his mother’s, and Simon was impressed that Anthony had refrained from pointing this out.
“It’s quite all right, Lady Bridgerton,” he interjected. “I’m sure Anthony and I have much to discuss.”
Anthony’s eyes narrowed. “Much.
”
”
Julia Quinn (The Duke and I (Bridgertons, #1))
“
Abandoned residential homes are common in the area—often the casualties of severe damage from hurricanes—but what I find fascinating is the mettle of the Cajuns we encountered and befriended. They may lose their roof and be forced to abandon their home, but it is a near surety that they will remain in the same area, raising a family. There is great cultural pride in these resourceful people, and it is evidenced by the tenacity of those who face the power of Gulf hurricanes every year, and yet remain.
”
”
Mike Correll (Abandoned Sulphur, Louisiana (America Through Time))
“
Many men are fascinated by the consciously evolving female who makes them feel free inside. But they're too unsure of their own standing to actually stay with such women. They want a sheepish, sort-of-dumb woman at home for them, then they imagine themselves being swept off their feet by a goddess somewhere outside. These are the kinds of men that aren't worth being with. You want to have a man who can sail a ship just as well as you can, a man who puts both his feet in the same boat at the same time, someone whose manhood is never defined by female docility.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.
”
”
Pat Conroy (The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son)
“
Some of his [Chester Bowles's] friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy. ... He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.
”
”
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
“
And I thought, of all the girls in this town, she is the one that I absolutely can’t find fascinating.”
“Is that the reason you sounded like you really didn’t want to take me home after that first night of pizza?”
“Yep. I wanted to limit contact. I was trying so hard not to fall for you.”
“Well, that’s why I knocked you over,” I said.
He laughed.
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
I concentrate on the picturesque sight of the beach, whose light sand offers a fascinating contrast to the rugged black rocks. The rolling waves with their white crests add even more sparkling nuances to the countless shades of blue and white of the sky with the low-hanging fog. And the Golden Gate Bridge towers majestically above it all.
It’s overwhelming.
”
”
Jutta Swietlinski (Returning Home to Her)
“
It's an old story," Julia says, leaning back in her chair. "Only for me, it's new. I went to school for industrial design. All my life I've been fascinated by chairs - I know it sounds silly, but it's true. Form meets purpose in a chair. My parents thought I was crazy, but somehow I convinced them to pay my way to California. To study furniture design. I was all excited at first. It was totally unlike me to go so far away from home. But I was sick of the cold and sick of the snow. I figured a little sun might change my life. So I headed down to L.A. and roomed with a friend of an ex-girlfriend of my brother's. She was an aspiring radio actress, which meant she was home a lot. At first, I loved it. I didn't even let the summer go by. I dove right into my classes. Soon enough, I learned I couldn't just focus on chairs. I had to design spoons and toilet-bowl cleaners and thermostats. The math never bothered me, but the professors did. They could demolish you in a second without giving you a clue if how to rebuild. I spent more and more time in the studio, with other crazed students who guarded their projects like toy-jealous kids. I started to go for walks. Long walks. I couldn't go home because my roommate was always there. The sun was too much for me, so I'd stay indoors. I spent hours in supermarkets, walking aisle to aisle, picking up groceries and then putting them back. I went to bowling alleys and pharmacies. I rode buses that kept their lights on all night. I sat in Laundromats because once upon a time Laundromats made me happy. But now the hum of the machines sounded like life going past. Finally, one night I sat too long in the laundry. The woman who folded in the back - Alma - walked over to me and said, 'What are you doing here, girl?' And I knew that there wasn't any answer. There couldn't be any answer. And that's when I knew it was time to go.
”
”
David Levithan (Are We There Yet?)
“
There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they’d discover that 95% of their peers are fine people.
”
”
Anthony Marais
“
am fascinated by this gap in work and perception. The answer, I think, lies in that space between the work husbands do and the work they think they do. What noticing is lost here? In her book The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that this work is upkeep, it is labor, and much like the work of home repair, it requires “noticing, acknowledging, and empathizing with the feelings of family members, patching up quarrels, and soothing hurt feelings.” In sum, the work of a home, of a life, is paying attention. Knowing that the dishwasher drain needs to be cleaned, that the counter is sticky, that the socks need to be matched: It’s the work of noticing that isn’t being done. And what is lost when the people who love us do not see our labor? It’s our happiness. —
”
”
Lyz Lenz (This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life)
“
His eyes are so heavy-lidded I can only see a slit of silver gleaming down at me. Then he licks his lips, and a thrill shoots up my spine. I know that look. I love that look. Wes shoves his trousers down. His thick erection slaps my abs. “I want to touch you,” I beg. “No.” His tone is commanding. It only intensifies the thrill. “Gotta hold you down so you don’t go running off again.” He gives me another lingering kiss just to drive the point home. And when he finally releases my wrists, he’s off the bed before I can reach for him. “Don’t move,” he whispers, and I go still, watching in near fascination as he charges across the room to where he dropped his wallet. He opens it, extracts one of his handy packets of travel lube, and returns to the bed. “Arms over your head.
”
”
Sarina Bowen (Us (Him, #2))
“
Britches,” John Cabot murmured. To Vanderbilt, he said in a low voice, “It’s fascinating—the connections of their speech with Elizabethan England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Africa, significantly. Their speech, the construction of their homes, their methods of farming, their musical instruments, all of it hardly evolved from earlier eras across oceans. Like a time capsule here in the hollows of the Blue Ridge.
”
”
Joy Jordan-Lake (Under a Gilded Moon)
“
[...] 'Imagine a town of scholars, all researching the most marvelous, fascinating things. Science. Mathematics. Languages. Literature. Imagine building after building filled with more books than you've seen in your entire life. Imagine quiet, solitude and a serene place to think.' He sighed. 'London is a blathering mess. It's impossible to get anything done here; the city's too loud, and it demands too much from you. You can escape out to places like Hampstead, but the screaming core draws you back in wether you like it or not. But Oxford gives you all the toold you need for your work – food, clothes, books, tea – and then it leaves you alone. It is the centre of all knowledge and innovation in the civilized world. And, should you progress sufficiently well in your studies here, you might one day be lucky enough to call it home.
”
”
R.F. Kuang (Babel)
“
Q. Which is my favorite country?
A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home.
”
”
Albert Podell (Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth)
“
Nevertheless, there are many respects, in tiny and contemptible matters, where our curiosity is provoked every day. How often do we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening. I now do not watch a dog chase a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. Unless you had proved to me my infirmity and quickly admonished me either to take the sight as the start for some reflection enabling me to rise up to you or wholly to scorn and pass the matter by, I would be watching like an empty-headed fool. When I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider entrapping them as they rush into its web often fascinates me. The problem is not made any different by the fact that the animals are small. The sight leads me on to praise you, the marvellous Creator and orderer of all things; but that was not how my attention first began. It is one thing to rise rapidly, another thing not to fall.
”
”
Augustine of Hippo (Confessions)
“
No one had asked about his life, the years aboard ship. As a child she had been fascinated by the way he would come home every year smaller, angrier, more leathery, until one day in her teens, he fell into bed and lay there glaring up at her and her mother, unable to rise, enraged, knowing that at the end of this furlough they expected him to pull up his carcass and make his way back to the dungeon of his vessel. Not once did they ask him how he felt. After all he was a man. Men endured.
”
”
Lakambini A. Sitoy (Jungle Planet and Other Stories)
“
The man had a way of making her feel that she was altogether a rather remarkable woman, a person of subtle and exotic talents, fascinating beyond measure; and what a very different thing that was from the dentist husband at home who never succeeded in making her feel that she was anything but a sort of eternal patient, someone who dwelt in the waiting room, silent among the magazines, seldom if ever nowadays to be called in to suffer the finicky precise ministrations of those clean pink hands.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat)
“
When the idea first occurred to her as she squatted in the shade of the Oficina Central del Registro Civil, it occurred as camouflage: they could disguise themselves as migrants. But now that she’s sitting in this quiet library with her son and their stuffed backpacks, like a thunderclap, Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.
”
”
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
“
At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.
”
”
Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography)
“
Fathers are unwitting objects of fascination for their daughters, and the interlude of their childhood leaves a bittersweet taste: never again, for anyone else, will we be domestic demi-gods, greeted like long-awaited saviours when we come home for dinner at the end of the working day. The years go by and their joy becomes less and less palpable, until one day they fail to greet us at all. This time is past and the countdown reaches zero. We had known it would happen, we just hadn't expected it to happen so quickly
”
”
Antoine Laurain (Smoking Kills)
“
What a lucky girl you are to have this opportunity to live in one of the world's great cities at this most fascinating point in its long, rich history, they had said. Little Becky had known enough not to ask if there was going to be a Banana Republic or a Gap there, or a Tower Records or a Starbucks or a Tweeters or a Blockbuster or a Super CVS or a Saks. Her mother only mentioned museums and concert halls and churches and architecture, so Little Becky was quite sure there was no room left in Prague for anything good to be built.
”
”
Nancy Clark (A Way from Home: A Novel (Hill Family #2))
“
Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren’t English. It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who’d never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me
”
”
Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #1))
“
You know how some people think cool equals bored, and they act like they’re alien scientists who drew the short straw and ended up assigned to observe this lowly species, humans, and they just lean against walls all the time, sighing and waiting to be called home to Zigborp-12, where all the fascinating geniuses are?
Yeah, well, Mik doesn’t sigh or lean, and his eyes are fully open like something awesome might happen at any time and he doesn’t want to miss it. If he’s an alien, he’s an alien from a gray planet without pizza or music, and he freaking loves it here.
”
”
Laini Taylor (Night of Cake & Puppets (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1.5))
“
Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, ideally in a house like Laxness’s Gljúfrasteinn, but also we write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves and cabinets full of … junk, treasure, both cultural – nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called “the compost heap” – and also personal stuff: childhood TV, home-grown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children, and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate …
”
”
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
“
Park Reader 5.0 out of 5 STARS
"Personable and Wistful"
August 25, 2018
I enjoy a story that can catch my attention quickly. Behind The Fan did just that. I couldn't wait to read about how Dottie and Nicky finally got together and how Dottie was able to raise her little brother at such a young age herself. Not to mention reading the history and mob stories about a location that I'm familiar with today. It was fascinating and hit home when thinking about lost loved ones. We all hope our loved ones are really that close.
I kind of hope there will be another book telling us about their married life and kids!
”
”
Caroline Walken (Behind the Fan)
“
It was awfully quiet. Chicago only gets this quiet when it snows, he thought. And then he flipped open the phone, pressed the voice button, and said “Katherine.” He said it softly, reverently.
Five rings and then her voice mail. Hey, it’s Katherine, he heard, and in the background cars rushed by. They’d been walking home together from the RadioShack when she recorded the message. I’m not, uh. And she uhed, he remembered, because he’d goosed her butt as she tried to talk. Uh, at my cell phone, I guess. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back. And he remembered everything about it, and also everything about everything else, and why couldn’t he forget and beep.
“Hey, it’s Col. I’m standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it’s hot. K. I’m standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That’s not interesting. But anyway, it’s hot, and so I’m thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from the ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn’t hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it’s hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still.”
Five minutes later, he was trudging back when his phone began vibrating. He raced back to the spot with good reception and, breathless answered.
“Did you listen to the message?” he asked immediately.
“I don’t think I need to,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Colin. But I think we made a really good decision.” And he didn’t even care to point out that they hadn’t made a decision, because the sound of her voice felt so good –well not good exactly. It felt like the mysterium tremedum et fascinans, the fear and the fascination. The great and terrible awe.
”
”
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
“
of fascinating books about this country and about faraway places like Albania, and she became well known the world over. But Rose grew up in a time when ladies did not consciously seek fame. She chose to shed light on the lives of others instead of her own, and so this book about her mother, her father, and herself had to wait until after her death to be published. Rose (who became Mrs. Rose Wilder Lane) led a full and busy life. After her mother died, she wrote the setting for On the Way Home. She also wrote a number of magazine articles, some of which were published as the Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework. She worked at length
”
”
Laura Ingalls Wilder (The First Four Years (Little House, #9))
“
She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.
”
”
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
“
But there is a dark and deadly side to this fascination with comfort and convenience. Among the developed nations, every 5 seconds the life of an unborn child is snuffed out through abortion.[1] The reason usually given? “We’re just not ready to have a baby now.” Translated into plain English, this means that having the baby would be too inconvenient. If a new human life should happen to get in the way of our career and income goals, school schedules or marriage plans, the first choice is ruthless and simple: kill it. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of feeling good. Abortion is one of the most shocking, yet entirely logical, extensions of this obsession with comfort, convenience and luxury.
”
”
K.P. Yohannan (The Road to Reality: Coming Home to Jesus from the Unreal World)
“
We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.
”
”
Richard Rohr (Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self)
“
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending? “I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—” Olive’s mother drinking coffee in Olive’s childhood home: yellow flowered tablecloth hands clasped around a blue coffee mug her smile “—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear, Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery, gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it “But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
“
This is an art I can enjoy. There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking; in the choosing of ingredients, the process of mixing, grating, melting, infusing, and flavoring, the recipes taken from ancient books, the traditional utensils- the pestle and mortar with which my mother made her incense turned to a more homely purpose, her spices and aromatics giving up their subtleties to a baser, more sensual magic. And it is partly the transience of it delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate. My mother always viewed my interest with indulgent contempt. To her, food was no pleasure but a tiresome necessity to be worried over, a tax on the price of our freedom. I stole menus from restaurants and looked longingly into patisserie windows. I must have been ten years old- maybe older- before I first tasted real chocolate. But still the fascination endured. I carried recipes in my head like maps. All kinds of recipes: torn from abandoned magazines in busy railway stations, wheedled from people on the road, strange marriages of my own confection. Mother with her cards, her divinations, directed our mad course across Europe. Cookery cards anchored us, placed landmarks on the bleak borders. Paris smells of baking bread and croissants; Marseille of bouillabaisse and grilled garlic. Berlin was Eisbrei with sauerkraut and Kartoffelsalat, Rome was the ice cream I ate without paying in a tiny restaurant beside the river.
”
”
Joanne Harris (Chocolat (Chocolat, #1))
“
Crimson silk sheets.
I’m in her and she’s looking at me like I’m her world. The woman undoes me.
I flinch. I’m having sex with me, seeing myself from his eyes. I look incredible naked—is that how he sees me? He doesn’t see any of my flaws. I’ve never looked half as good to myself. I want to pull out. It feels perverse. I’m fascinated. But this was not what I was hunting for at all . . .
Where are the handcuffs? Ah, grab her fucking head, she’s going down on me again. She’ll make me come. Tie her up. Is she back? How much longer do I have?
He senses me there.
Get out of my HEAD!
I deepen the kiss, bite his tongue, and he is violent with lust. I take advantage, diving deep. There’s a thought he’s shielding. I want it.
Nobody home but She for Whom I am the World. Can’t go on like this, can’t keep doing it.
Why couldn’t he go on? What couldn’t he keep doing? I’m having sex with him, any way he wants me, while I stare up at him with utter worship. Where was the problem there?
Weariness suddenly crashes over me. I’m in his body, and I’m coming beneath him, and I’m checking my eyes warily.
What the fuck am I doing here?
He knew what he was, what I was.
He knew we came from different worlds, didn’t belong together.
Yet for a few months there’d been no lines of demarcation between us. We’d existed in a place beyond definitions, where no rules had mattered, and I wasn’t the only one who’d reveled in it. But the entire time I’d been lost in sexual bliss, he’d been aware of time passing, of everything that was happening—that I was mindless, I wasn’t willing, and when I snapped out of it I’d blame him.
Keep hoping to see the light in her eyes. Even knowing it’ll mean she’s saying good-bye.
I had. Irrational or not, I’d held it against him. He’d seen me naked, body and soul, and I hadn’t seen him at all. I’d been blinded by helpless lust that hadn’t been for him. I had been lust, and he’d been there.
Just one time, he’s thinking as we watch my glazed eyes go even emptier.
One time, what? Instead of pushing, I try a stealth attack. I pretend to retreat, let him think he’s won, and at the last minute turn around. Instead of lunging for his thoughts, I stay very, very still and listen.
He pushes my hair out of my face. I look like an animal. There’s no sentience in my gaze. I’m a cavewoman, with a miniscule, pre-historic brain.
When you know who I am. Let me be your man.
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
“
Lilian was very soon well on her way into the mysterious retreat. The lure of the waters, the thought of the remote, unknown head of the valley, carried her forward. She was alone, excited, even happy in this craggy, tangled, gradually darkening, thoroughly wonderful, increasingly fascinating wild retreat. Here was her dear childhood again. Here was the original wholeness she had lost: fresh life, young knowledge of abundance, no inkling of loss or defeat. And here, at last (not in the lewd streets of the cities), her glorious beauty was clean, her life was clean, her sex. Like a growing, lovely flower, a supple shoot, a burgeoning tree, Lilian knew that this, this lovely mountain-womb, was her home; the world to which her radiant body belonged was this living world of the bursting flowers and the trees.
”
”
Joseph Campbell (Mythic Imagination (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell))
“
Even at that time, my only friends were made of paper and ink. At school I had learned to read and write long before the other children. Where my school friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets , and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated me and I saw in them a key with which I could unlock a boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those streets and those troubled days in which even I could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me. My father didn’t like to see books in the house. There was something about them – apart from the letters he could not decipher – that offended him. He used to tell me as soon as I was ten he would send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all my scatterbrained ideas because otherwise I’d end up being a loser, a nobody.
”
”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“
I say, it sounds like some dangerous psychotic killer wrote this, and this buttoned-down schizophrenic could probably go over the edge at any moment in the working day and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic. My boss just looks at me. The guy, I say, is probably at home every night with a little rattail file, filing a cross into the tip of every one of his rounds. This way, when he shows up to work one morning and pumps a round into his nagging, ineffectual, petty, whining, butt-sucking, candy-ass boss, that one round will split along the filed grooves and spread open the way a dumdum bullet flowers inside you to blow a bushel load of your stinking guts out through your spine. Picture your gut chakra opening in a slow-motion explosion of sausage-casing small intestine. My boss takes the paper out from under my nose. Go ahead, I say, read some more. No really, I say, it sounds fascinating. The work of a totally diseased mind. And I smile. The little butthole-looking edges of the hole in my cheek are the same blue-black as a dog’s gums. The skin stretched tight across the swelling around my eyes feels varnished. My boss just looks at me. Let me help you, I say. I say, the fourth rule of fight club is one fight at a time. My boss looks at the rules and then looks at me. I say, the fifth rule is no shoes, no shirts in the fight. My boss looks at the rules and looks at me. Maybe, I say, this totally diseased fuck would use an Eagle Apache carbine because an Apache takes a thirty-shot mag and only weighs nine pounds. The Armalite only takes a five-round magazine. With thirty shots, our totally fucked hero could go the length of mahogany row and take out every vice-president with a cartridge left over for each director. Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person. I just look at my boss. My boss has blue, blue, pale cornflower blue eyes. The J and R 68 semiautomatic carbine also takes a thirty-shot mag, and it only weighs seven pounds. My boss just looks at me. It’s scary, I say. This is probably somebody he’s known for years. Probably this guy knows all about him, where he lives, and where his wife works and his kids go to school. This is exhausting, and all of a sudden very, very boring. And why does Tyler need ten copies of the fight club rules? What I don’t have to say is I know about the leather interiors that cause birth defects. I know about the counterfeit brake linings that looked good enough to pass the purchasing agent, but fail after two thousand miles. I know about the air-conditioning rheostat that gets so hot it sets fire to the maps in your glove compartment. I know how many people burn alive because of fuel-injector flashback. I’ve seen people’s legs cut off at the knee when turbochargers start exploding and send their vanes through the firewall and into the passenger compartment. I’ve been out in the field and seen the burned-up cars and seen the reports where CAUSE OF FAILURE is recorded as "unknown.” No, I say, the paper’s not mine. I take the paper between two fingers and jerk it out of his hand. The edge must slice his thumb because his hand flies to his mouth, and he’s sucking hard, eyes wide open. I crumble the paper into a ball and toss it into the trash can next to my desk. Maybe, I say, you shouldn’t be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
“
The old woman was not a quitter. She had her story goal – to get home – and I the reader had my story question: Would she get home that night? So she kept moving along intent on her story goal, and soon came to a pool of water. “Water, water, quench fire,” she urged. “Fire won’t burn stick, stick won’t beat dog, dog won’t bite pig, pig won’t jump over the stile, and I won’t get home tonight!” But – you guessed it – the water wouldn’t. So – but you’ve begun to get the idea, I’m sure. As a small child, I was not only fascinated with this story, but can still recall a certain degree of worry and tension in me as my mother read the tale to me over and over again. It was only many years later that it dawned on me that the story worked because all the scenes worked so well, all relating very clearly to the story question, and all ending in a disaster.
”
”
Jack M. Bickham (Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure)
“
I am beginning to see the fallacy in the Western world’s take on dying. Too often we are taught that this one life is all there is and when it ends, that’s it. Or, instead of once again returning to a loving God who welcomes us back Home with open arms, we are told that when we die we must stand in front of a stern and unforgiving deity who sits on a throne and looks at every mistake we have ever made, deciding if we are good enough to enter heaven. And, if we do make it past that stringent test, we certainly aren’t able to visit our friends and family still living. No wonder so many of us are afraid of death. I also find it fascinating that most religions believe in angels or wise ascended souls who brought messages to certain people on earth (Moses and Noah, for example) thousands of years ago, but deny that such an occurrence can happen now. What, did God just decide not to talk to us anymore?
”
”
Donna Visocky (I'll Meet You at the Base of the Mountain: One woman's journey from grief to life.)
“
There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about seventeen hundred years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over fifty years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows. Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place. Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises. In this way, vagabonding is not a merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases. Rather, it’s the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating a new fascination with people and places. This attitude is not something you can pick up at the airport counter with your boarding pass; it’s a process that starts at home. It’s a process by which you first test the waters that will pull you to wonderful new places.
”
”
Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel)
“
Jane, I don’t care what capacity you let me have in your life. I just want to be there. And if that means I have to keep my distance, I’ll do that.”
I sighed. If ever there was a time for me to lay all my cards on the table, this was it. Naked, wounded, and vulnerable. “So, here’s my basic
problem with us, the reason I can’t seem to relax into a relationship with you, the reason I find problems where none exist and I push you away. I—I can’t figure out why you’re with me!” I exclaimed, clapping my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t meant for that part to come out. I had meant to say, “You lie and hide things from me.”
Gabriel pried my fingers away from my lips. My hands trembled as stuff I’d been feeling for months tumbled from my tongue. “I know that
makes me neurotic and sad, but I can’t figure out why you want to be with me. Every other woman in your life is exotic and beautiful and has all this history. And I’m just some drunk girl you followed home from a bar, some pathetic human you felt your usual need to protect, and you got stuck with a lifetime tie to her because she was dumb enough to get shot. I can’t stand the idea that you feel obligated to me. I know I’m insecure and pushy and spastic, desperately inappropriate at times and just plain odd at others. And I can’t help but wonder why you would want that when there are obviously so many other options. I can’t help but feel that I’m keeping you from someone better.”
I let out a loud, long breath. It felt as if some tremendous weight on my chest had wiggled loose and then dropped away. No more running. No more floating along and waiting. My cards were on the table. If Gabriel and I couldn’t have a future after this, it wasn’t because I held back from him. Now I could only hope it didn’t blow up in my face in some horrible way. I wasn’t sure my face could handle much more.
Gabriel sighed and cupped my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. “I didn’t follow you that night because I wanted to protect you. I followed you that night because you were one of the most interesting people I’d met in decades. You had this light about you, this sweetness, this biting humor. After I’d only known you for an hour, you made me laugh harder than I had since before I was turned. You made me feel normal, at peace, for the first time in years. And I didn’t want to lose that yet. Even if it was just watching over you from a mile away, I didn’t want to leave your presence. I followed you because I didn’t want to let you go. Even then, I saw you were one of the most extraordinary, fascinating, maddening people I would ever know. Even then, I think I knew that I would love you. If you don’t love me, that’s one thing. But if you do, just stop arguing with me about it. It’s annoying. ”
“Fair enough,” I conceded. “Why the hell couldn’t you have told me this a year ago?”
“I’ve wanted to. You weren’t ready to hear it.
”
”
Molly Harper (Nice Girls Don't Live Forever (Jane Jameson, #3))
“
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Anathem)
“
I guess you can tell by now that I was thoroughly fascinated with Susan. I’d never met anyone like her. I’d never even heard of anyone like her. I was also feeling just the teeniest bit angry, though.
Susan was very special. That was obvious, but everyone treated her like some kind of outcast. Her parents were taking her out of one away-from-home school and putting her in another.
Why couldn’t they keep her with them? There are schools for handicapped kids around here. Day schools like the one Matt Braddock goes to in Stamford. There are also classes for handicapped kids in the public schools.
And why didn’t her parents try to help Susan make friends? She couldn’t talk, but neither could Matt, and he had plenty of friends. The kids in his neighborhood learned some sign language so they could play with him.
I decided that I would not only take on the job with Susan, but that I would use the month I had with her to show the Felders that she could live and learn and make friends at home. She did not have to be an outcast.
”
”
Ann M. Martin (Kristy and the Secret of Susan (The Baby-Sitters Club, #32))
“
He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty of spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way he had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight to the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible. Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing to say to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which he felt himself at home. He
”
”
W. Somerset Maugham (Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham)
“
Why else would they come out here?” This statement was not as dour as it sounded; Beatriz was not the only one in Bicho Raro who could be strictly pragmatic. Pete gestured to the land around them. “Because it’s pretty.” The desert preened and Michael regarded Pete anew. One compliments a man when one compliments his chosen home, and Michael felt nearly as good as the desert about Pete’s words. Kindly, he said, “You better get into some dry clothes now.” Straightening up, Pete finger-combed his rain-flat hair into its usual style. “Soon. Got to pick some beetles first. See you later, sir!” He left Michael standing there by the side of the barn, sheering off hard left to avoid a shadow he thought might be Beatriz, and then threw himself back into beetle picking. Ordinarily, Michael would have also thrown himself directly back into work, but for the first time in a very long time, Michael stood there for a full five minutes before beginning his next job, just watching Pete start on his next project. Humans have always been fascinated by mirrors, after all. Michael had never seen from the outside how it looked to work constantly to avoid feeling, and he could not look away.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (All the Crooked Saints)
“
While Missy has acquired a taste for frog legs, she still doesn’t understand my fascination with catching them. One night after church, we were stopped at an intersection while driving home. Our two sons, Reed and Cole, and our daughter, Mia, were in Missy’s car with us. It was raining, and I saw one of the biggest bullfrogs I’ve ever seen sitting in the middle of the road. I put her car in park.
“What are you about to do, Jason?” Missy asked me.
“I’m going to catch that frog,” I said. “Y’all want to flag traffic for me?”
“Don’t you dare get out of this car,” she said.
Before she could finish her sentence, I’d jumped out of the driver’s seat and was maneuvering my way to the frog. I moved toward the back of it, assumed the frog position, and then leaped on him! Missy and Mia were screaming in the car, and my boys were laughing. As I got back in the car, I explained to everyone that I probably saved that frog’s life by catching him at a busy intersection. I held the frog in one hand and drove with the other the entire way home.
When I walked into the kitchen, Missy asked me, “What are you fixing to do?”
I cleaned the frog on the kitchen table and fried its legs in a frying pan.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” Missy said. “I thought you saved his life.”
Hey, but I gave him a noble death.
”
”
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
“
Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the cops to contrive culture. Is it essential to describe at length, besides the condition of youth, students and intellectuals, armies of workers with or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and semi-colonized of all sorts, all those who endure a well-organized daily life, is it here necessary to exhibit the derisory and untragic misery of the inhabitant, of the suburban dweller and of the people who stay in residential ghettoes, in the mouldering centres of old cities and in the proliferations lost beyond them? One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it.
”
”
Henri Lefebvre (Writings on Cities)
“
I’m going to miss all the takeout,” Jason said later, after dinner, when I walked him out to his car. “Coach said his wife cooks their meals every night.”
“That’s really why you’re leaving, isn’t it?” I asked. “For real home-cooked meals?”
He put his hands on my waist, drew me near. “If you knew how hard I found it to stay on my side of the hall last night after we finished watching the movie…” He shook his head. “Your parents absolutely wouldn’t approve of the direction that my thoughts are going. With or without your mom’s contract, I’d move out.”
“I can’t believe she did that.”
He grinned. “Yeah, it was that first night, after she came out of your room.”
“Weren’t you offended?”
“How could I be? I started falling for you as soon as you bumped into me. I knew I could be a goner so easily.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. And when I pictured you in shoulder pads and a helmet--”
I shoved his shoulder. “You did not!”
“Oh, yeah, I did. And I thought, of all the girls in this town, she is the one that I absolutely can’t find fascinating.”
“Is that the reason you sounded like you really didn’t want to take me home after that first night of pizza?”
“Yep. I wanted to limit contact. I was trying so hard not to fall for you.”
“Well, that’s why I knocked you over,” I said.
He laughed.
“Will you still come play ball with Dad?”
“Sure. But you have to play, too.”
I smiled. “Okay.”
It was so, so hard--a dozen kisses later--watching him leave. But at least I knew he’d be back.
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I don't think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I'd gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them the subway or the crosstown bus. Years had passed, and I still hadn't stopped thinking about the dark-haired children in Catholic school uniforms - brother and sister - I'd seen in Grand Central, literally trying to pull their father out the door of a seedy bar by the sleeves of his suit jacket. Nor had I forgotten the frail, gypsyish girl in a wheelchair out in front of the Carlyle Hotel, talking breathlessly in Italian to the fluffy dog in her lap while a sharp character in sunglasses (father? bodyguard?) stood behind her chair, apparently conducting some sort of business deal on his phone. For years, I'd turned those strangers over in my mind, wondering who they were and what their lives were like, and I knew I would go home and wonder about this girl and her grandfather the same way.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time the season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote.
"Any," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody" - Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all - "looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan. S. Barnable.
”
”
John Crowley (Little, Big)
“
In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth discovered to her pleasure that she could ask Ian any question about any subject and that he would answer her as fully as she wished. Not once did he ever patronize her when he replied, or fend her off by pointing out that, as a woman, the matter was truly none of her concern-or worse-that the answer would be beyond any female’s ability to understand. Elizabeth found his respect for her intelligence enormously flattering-particularly after two astounding discoveries she made about him:
The first occurred three days after their wedding, when they both decided to spend the evening at home, reading.
That night after supper, Ian brought a book he wanted to read from their library-a heavy tome with an incomprehensible title-to the drawing room. Elizabeth brought Pride and Prejudice, which she’d been longing to read since first hearing of the uproar it was causing among the conservative members of the ton. After pressing a kiss on her forehead, Ian sat down in the high-backed chair beside hers. Reaching across the small table between them for her hand, he linked their fingers together, and opened his book. Elizabeth thought it was incredibly cozy to sit, curled up in a chair beside him, her hand held in his, with a book in her lap, and she didn’t mind the small inconvenience of turning the pages with one hand.
Soon, she was so engrossed in her book that it was a full half-hour before she noticed how swiftly Ian turned the pages of his. From the corner of her eye, Elizabeth watched in puzzled fascination as his gaze seemed to slide swiftly down one page, then the facing page, and he turned to the next. Teasingly, she asked, “Are you reading that book, my lord, or only pretending for my benefit?”
He glanced up sharply, and Elizabeth saw a strange, hesitant expression flicker across his tanned face. As if carefully phrasing his reply, he said slowly, “I have an-odd ability-to read very quickly.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth replied, “how lucky you are. I never heard of a talent like that.”
A lazy glamorous smile swept across his face, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s not nearly as uncommon as your eyes,” he said.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Bringing back the Golden Fleece,” I repeated, mocking him. “As if it exists.”
Castor frowned. “What’s biting you? Of course it exists! We told you what Jason said. It belonged to a marvelous ram sent by the gods to rescue two royal children, Phrixus and Helle, from their murderous stepmother. A pity it wasn’t a perfect rescue. Phrixus reached Colchis safely, but his sister, Helle, fell off in mid-flight and drowned. Jason says that’s why the place where she plunged into the sea’s called the Hellespont. If that doesn’t prove the story’s true, what will satisfy you?”
“Anyone can give a place a name,” I said, rolling my eyes. “When I get home, I’ll name that olive grove near our training ground Wolf Forest and see what happens. A ram with a fleece of real gold, a flying ram that could carry the children through the skies to Colchis, where there are dragons, oh yes, that’s believable! That’s worth risking your lives for on a voyage across the world! I’ll bet you don’t care if that story’s true or not. You just want an excuse to go off chasing fame!”
Polydeuces set a honey cake on my already heaping plate. “There must be something waiting for us in Colchis, little sister,” he said gently. “Maybe not the gold fleece of a flying ram, but something. Why would Jason go to the trouble and expense of outfitting a ship for such a long, dangerous voyage otherwise?” He smiled wistfully and added, “You mustn’t worry about us. We’ll come back; we’ll be fine.”
He was right: I was worried about what would become of my brothers on that great adventure. But more than that, I envied them with all my heart. So what if the goal of their expedition was the phantom fleece of a ram that never existed? The fascinating lands my brothers would see and the exploits they’d share would be real enough. And I’d be left behind.
They’ll see marvels I can’t being to imagine, I thought. Maybe they’ll even see that old sailor’s five-legged monster! Meanwhile, I’m going to be trundled home in an oxcart so thickly hedged around by Spartan soldiers that all I’ll see during my journey will be spears. It’s not fair! I can handle a sword almost as well as either of them, and I know I’m better with a bow and arrow!
”
”
Esther M. Friesner (Nobody's Princess (Nobody's Princess, #1))
“
Here is a summary based on the speculations of the well-known scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade:2 Once upon a time, when the economic level of human beings could only be described in terms of mere subsistence, people were highly aware of their natural environment. Among the many things that intrigued them was the splendor of the sky. They realized the sky with its brilliant light, which illuminated every part of the world, was different from anything else they encountered. They were aware of the many items that populated the universe such as trees, mountains, and rivers, as well as people and their implements. But those were all different from the sky. When the people saw a rock, they simply saw a rock; when they beheld the sky, they saw something so vast and so beyond anything that they could touch or understand that they were simultaneously fascinated and intimidated by it. In many ways they feared the sky, but they also saw the sky as friendly to them, at least most of the time. The sky brought sunshine, it brought rain, and it was their constant companion, whether they were hunting or fishing or collecting edible vegetation. The sky was always present. Sometimes the sky would be angry, and it might send thunder and lightning and possibly even downpours so harsh they resulted in harmful floods. But after the sky had worked off its temper, the rain and the cool its tantrum had produced contributed to making further life possible and bearable. The sky, people said, is great. We cannot conceive of anything greater than the sky; and, what’s more, if we pray to it, it often fulfills our desires. It knows and understands us. Because it is so great, nothing is beyond its capability. Understanding these amazing qualities of the sky, it seemed that it was more than just an object: it was a great being, who was not just a thing up there, but who in some ways resembled a human person, except that its powers exceeded anything we humans are capable of. The people began to think of the sky as the home of a super person and considered him to be “god.” They thought they could call him by his name and approach him if they were careful. Having come to think of him as a supreme god now, they recognized that he was still the Great Shining One, who is beyond our understanding, and they continued to be in total awe of him. Thus, according to Eliade, the sky had become one of the important manifestations of what is sacred in the world. He called such disclosures “hierophanies,” which means literally, “manifestations of the Holy.” The little narration above is based on his exposition of the sacredness of the sky, which he says “symbolizes transcendence, power and changelessness simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful.”3
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Winfried Corduan (In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism)
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The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious: it lies on the surface and anybody can see it. It concerns itself with physical appearances as well as with certain mental habits and traits. There is little in common, to outward seeming, between the Pathan of the Northwest and the Tamil in the far South. Their racial stocks are not the same, though there may be common strands running through them; they differ in face and figure, food and clothing, and, of course, language … The Pathan and Tamil are two extreme examples; the others lie somewhere in between. All of them have still more the distinguishing mark of India. It is fascinating to find how the Bengalis, the Marathas, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajputs, and the great central block comprising the Hindustani-speaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics for hundreds of years, have still more or less the same virtues and failings of which old tradition or record tells us, and yet have been throughout these ages distinctively Indian, with the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities. There was something living and dynamic about this heritage, which showed itself in ways of living and a philosophical attitude to life and its problems. Ancient India, like ancient China, was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in and often influenced that culture and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of beliefs and customs was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged. In ancient and medieval times, the idea of the modern nation was non-existent, and feudal, religious, racial, and cultural bonds had more importance. Yet I think that at almost any time in recorded history an Indian would have felt more or less at home in any part of India, and would have felt as a stranger and alien in any other country. He would certainly have felt less of a stranger in countries which had partly adopted his culture or religion. Those, such as Christians, Jews, Parsees, or Moslems, who professed a religion of non-Indian origin or, coming to India, settled down there, became distinctively Indian in the course of a few generations. Indian converts to some of these religions never ceased to be Indians on account of a change of their faith. They were looked upon in other countries as Indians and foreigners, even though there might have been a community of faith between them.6
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Fali S. Nariman (Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography)
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Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's.
"Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with."
I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen.
"The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place."
Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home.
"The third level is social. A sense of belonging."
Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country.
"Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem."
I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression.
The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America.
"The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness."
Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.
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Judy A. Bernstein (Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights)