Flora And Ulysses Quotes

Nothing would be easier without you, because you are everything, all of it- sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts, eggs sunny-side up- you are the ever-expanding universe to me.

I promise to always turn back toward you.

Don't we all live in our heads? Where else could we possibly exist? Our brains are the universe.

So many miracles have not yet happened.

All words at all times, true or false, whispered or shouted, are clues to the workings of the human heart.

You are the ever-expanding universe to me

That was the thing about tragedy. It was just sitting there, keeping you company, waiting. And you had absolutely no idea.

Bah, cynics," said Dr. Meescham. "Cynics are people who are afraid to believe.

Holy unanticipated occurrences!

Who can say what astonishments are hidden inside the most mundane being?

But she couldn't help it. She did hope. She was hoping. She had been hoping all along.

I love your round head, the brilliant green, the watching blue, these letters, this world, you. I am very, very hungry.

The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.

Flora’s heart, the lonely, many-armed squid of it, flipped and flailed inside her.

Pascal," said Dr. Meescham, "had it that since it could not be proven whether God existed, one might as well believe that he did, because there was everything to gain by believing and nothing to lose. This is how it is for me. What do I lose if I choose to believe? Nothing!" "Take this squirrel, for instance. Ulysses. Do I believe he can type poetry? Sure, I do believe it. There is much more beauty in the world if I believe such a thing is possible.

It's not even that I bump into things. It's more that things leap out of nowhere and bump into me

I am alone in the world, Dolores, and I am homesick for my own kind.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

Do not hope; instead, observe” were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

Sometimes there are no reasons. Often, most of the time, there are no reasons. The world cannot be explained.

When I was a girl in Blundermeecen we wondered always if we would see each other again. Each day was uncertain. So, to say good-bye to someone was uncertain, too. Would you see them again? Who could say? Blundermeecen was a place of dark secrets, unmarked graves, terrible curses. Trolls were everywhere! So we said good-bye to each other the best way we could. We said: I promise to always turn back toward you.

Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel. Huge portions of what is loosely termed "the squirrel brain" are given over to one thought: food. The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this: I wonder what there is to eat.

That squid is a villain," said Flora out loud. "He needs to be vanquished. He's eating a boat. And he's going to eat all of the people on the boat." "Yes, well, loneliness makes us do terrible things," said Dr. Meescham. "And that is why the picture is there, to remind me of this. Also, because the other Dr. Meescham painted it when he was young and joyful." Good grief, thought Flora. What did he paint when he was old and depressed?

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!" There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"?

A squirrel flies in," said Dr. Meescham. "This I did not expect at all. It is what I love about life, that things happen which I do not expect. When I was a girl in Blundermeecen, we left the window open for this very reason, even in the winter. We did it because we believed something wonderful might make its way to us through the open window. Did wonderful things find us? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But tonight it has happened! Something wonderful!" Dr. Meescham clapped her hands. "A window has been left open. A squirrel flies in the window. The heart of an old woman rejoices!

All things are possible. When I was a girl in Blundermeecen, the miraculous happened every day. Or every other day. Or every third day. Actually, sometimes it did not happen at all, even on the third day. But still, we expected it. You see what I'm saying? Even when it didn't happen, we were expecting it. We knew the miraculous would come.

William Spiver said that the universe was expanding…that means there will be more of everything! More cheese puffs, more jelly sandwiches, more words, more poems, more love. And more giant donuts…maybe even gianter donuts. Is gianter a word? It should be.

When the other Dr. Meescham was alive and I could not sleep, do you know what he would do for me? This man would put on his slippers and he would go out into the kitchen and he would fix for me sardines and crackers. You know sardines? Little fishes in a can. He would put these little fishes onto crackers for me, and then I would hear him coming back down the hallway, carrying the sardines and humming, returning to me. Such tenderness. To have someone get out of bed and bring you little fishes and sit with you as you eat them in the dark of the night. To hum to you. This is love.

Flora reached out and grabbed hold of William Spiver's hand, and he held on to her. It was as if he were drowning and she were standing on solid ground. According to TERRIBLE THINGS! drowning people were desperate, out of their minds with fear. In their panic they could pull you, the rescuer, under, if you weren't careful. So Flora held on tightly to William Spiver. And he held on tightly back.

I ask you, why is it so hard to stay away from the euphemisms? They creep in, always, and attempt to make the difficult things more pleasing.

And I have some poetry that I would like to recite to you in honor of the recent, um, transformations in your life.” Tootie put a hand on her chest. “This is Rilke,” she said. “‘You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me. / Flare up like flame / and make big shadows I can move in.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Flora hated the phrase “correct me if I’m wrong.” In her experience, people only said it when they knew they were right.

This malfeasance must be stopped,” said Flora in a deep and superheroic voice.

The Criminal Element spoke often, and passionately, about the nefarious activities that every human being is capable of. Not only did it insist that the human heart was dark beyond all reckoning; it also likened the heart to a river. And further, it said, "If we are not careful, that river can carry us along in its hidden currents of want and anger and need, and transform each of us into the very criminal we fear.

What was the apostrophe doing there? Did the doctor own the Meescham? And what was it with exclamation marks? Did people not know what they were for? Surprise, anger, joy—that's what exclamation marks were for. They had nothing to do with who resided where.

Stall! Delay! Obfuscate! “Let’s,” said Flora.

To have someone get out of bed and bring you little fishes and sit with you as you eat them in the dark of night. To hum to you. This is love.

Flora had decided that this was part of the reason her parents had divorced. Not the noise of the writing, but the writing itself. Specifically, the writing of romance. Flora

Normalcy is an illusion, of course,” said William Spiver. “There is no normal.

know to be a safe port in a storm?” Flora suddenly remembered her dream, how warm William Spiver’s hand had felt in her own. She blushed. Whom did she trust? Good grief, she trusted William Spiver.

It was astonishing, really, what people could live through. Flora felt cheered up all of a sudden, just thinking about eating seal blubber and doing impossible things, surviving when the odds were against her and her squirrel. They

the human heart was dark beyond all reckoning; it also likened the heart to a river. And further, it said, “If we are not careful, that river can carry us along in its hidden currents of want and anger and need, and transform each of us into the very criminal we fear.

So much happiness!" said Dr. Meescham. "This is how it was when I was a girl in Blundermeecen. Like this. Always opening the door in the middle of the night and finding the face of someone you wanted to see. Well, not always. Sometimes it was the face of someone you did not want to see. But always, always in Blundermeecen, you opened the door because you could not stop hoping that on the other side of it would be the face of someone you loved." Dr. Meescham looked at William Spiver and then at Tootie. She smiled. "And maybe, too, the face of someone you did not yet know but might come to love.

died.

it could not be proven whether God existed, one might as well believe that he did, because there was everything to gain by believing and nothing to lose.

cynic,

If he was dead, well, that was interesting, too.

Flora’s heart, the lonely, many-armed squid of it, flipped and flailed inside of her.

Nothing would be easier without you, because you are everything, all of it — sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts, eggs sunny - side up — you are the ever - expanding universe to me.

she were forced to describe it, she would say that it tasted exactly like squirrel: fuzzy, damp, slightly nutty. “Have you lost your

She liked the way the words sounded. She imagined them floating above her in a comic-strip bubble

The

I’m

Bah,

Words for Flora Nothing would be easier without you, because you are everything, all of it — sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts, eggs sunny - side up — you are the ever - expanding universe to me.

She wrote about love because she had love.

The miraculous happened every day. Sometimes it did not happen. But still, we expected it. Even when it didn't happen, we were expecting it. We knew the miraculous would come.

here was Ulysses, sitting in a shoe box, knowing that there was a shovel in the trunk of the car and that the man driving the car had been instructed to whack him over the head with the shovel, and the squirrel didn’t look worried or afraid. He looked happy.

food.

thoughts of food.

A SUPERHERO SQUIRREL RESTED AT HER FEET, AND SO SHE WAS NOT LONELY AT ALL emblazoned

HE IS AN UNASSUMING JANITOR. BUT HE WILL DARE TO BATTLE THE DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE. DO YOU DOUBT HIM? DO NOT. ALFRED T. SLIPPER WILL LIVE TO FIGHT THE FORCES OF EVIL. HE WILL BECOME KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS INCANDESTO! Flora

HE WILL BECOME KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS ULYSSES! Holy

To Flora, the doorbell sounded like the electric chair. Not

Everything was astonishing. The setting sun was illuminating each blade of grass. It was reflecting off the girl’s glasses, making a halo of light around the girl’s round head, setting the whole world on fire.

Words for Flora Nothing would be easier withou you, because you are everything, all of it- sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts,eggs sunny side up you are the ever expanding universe to me.

There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, “You’re going to vacuum up that squirrel!”?

...these were the kind of idiotic words her parents spoke. And they said these the words to each other, even though they were pretending that they were talking to Flora.

  Words for Flora Nothing would be easier without you, because you are everything, all of it — sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts, eggs sunny - side up — you are the ever - expanding universe to me.

Alfred T. Slipper was a janitor. Most of the time (often, in fact) they treated him with disdain. They had no idea of the astonishing acts of heroism, the blinding light, contained within his outward humdrum disguise. Only Alfred's parakeet, Dolores, knew who he was and what he could do.

YOU’RE GOING TO VACUUM UP THAT SQUIRREL!

TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!

I want things to be normal. I want a daughter who is happy. I want her to have friends who aren’t squirrels. I don’t want her to end up unloved and all alone in the world. But it doesn’t matter, does it?

will be a scientific adventure.

What was a squirrel supposed to do with all of these thoughts and feelings?

Such tenderness. To have someone get out of bed and bring you little fishes and sit with you as you eat them in the dark of night. To hum to you. This is love.

She was on her own. She laughed. “What are you laughing about?” said William Spiver. Flora laughed louder. William Spiver laughed along with her. “What’s so funny back there?” said Tootie. “Everything,” said Flora. “Wheeee,” said Tootie. And then they were all laughing. Except for Mary Ann, who couldn’t laugh because she was inanimate. But even if she had been capable of laughing, she probably wouldn’t have done it. She just wasn’t that kind of lamp.