Hooper Quotes

If you love someone, put their name in a circle; because hearts can be broken, but circles never end.

Screw the rules, damn the consequences, and just love. Love until it kills you, because there's nothing better worth dying for.

There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.

But in real life, happily-ever-after is just the beginning. It's where life starts.

Even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.

Saying that you love is easy, but living up to those simple words is the most difficult thing you'll ever do.

Anger is the fluid love bleeds when you cut it.

We're all scared most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren't. Be scared, and then jump into that fear. Again and again. Just remember to hold on to yourself while you do it.

Maybe that's what is means to be human . . . forever questioning our certainties.

Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea.

Beauty is sometimes hidden under a veil of tragedy.

Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhoea.

You told me, once, to just remember to breathe. As long as you can do that, you're doing something good.

I was put on this earth to love you. I know no other kind of existence bit to live and breathe for your well being. It's who I am, and who I will always be.

Love without trust. The difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul

And you, you scare people because you are whole all by yourself. — Lauren Alex Hooper, yin and yang

When you heart and soul are in it, making love is not just special, Maryah-- it's magical.

I know what I don't want. I don't want to live through somebody else. To do what others expect me to do, be what they think I should be. I have to make my own choices, my own decisions. I have to control my own life, at least as much as any of us can

Dear Judy Blume, why didn’t you write a book about how to survive talking to your centuries-old, super-duper experienced, smoking-hot soul mate about sex for the first time ever? That book would have been extremely helpful in preparing me for this incredibly awkward situation.

Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.

Go do whatever, wherever. Go do it alone, and now, because you want to and you're allowed to and you can.

Sometimes reality is better than dreams

I had to learn to value myself before I could expect to be valued by others

without understanding and respect, even love could turn into a trap all too easily

Love until it kills you, because there's nothing better worth dying for.

Sex is a sacred act which sadly, over the past few decades, has been demeaned and demoralized until it means almost nothing to most people. Veray few still appreciate the emotional and spiritual connection that can and should take place when two bodies and souls are joined together.

I don't want us to be together because either of us is afraid. We have to be whole before we can share what we are with each other

Time stretched before her in an endless, predictable path of banal routines—

Time doesn't heal all, no matter what they say. And tragedies don't make you stronger. That's another popular lie. They just make you more hardened, less surprised by misfortune.

Delaying gratification is one of the most rewarding human pleasures. In almost all cases, the anticipation of an enjoyable experience is as pleasurable as the experience itself.

When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.

Every soul is a story shelved away in an infinite library in the sky.

Outside, gray clouds stretched to infinity. Were my parents and Mikey out there somewhere? I imagined them soaring like birds through the heavens, and wondered how, in a sky so endless, could there be no room for me?

There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong.

To fantasies', he said. 'Tell me about yours.' His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile.

We have good days and bad days. You told me, once, to just remember to breathe. As long as you can do that, you’re doing something Good, you said. Getting rid of the old, and letting in the new. And, therefore, moving forward. Making progress. That’s all you have to do to move forward, sometimes, you said, just breathe. So don’t worry, Etta, if nothing else, I am still breathing.

Prologue Summer, 1962 MARSH MCKITTRICK’S BUICK WAS passed through the gates of the vast Government complex outside Langley. He eased onto the turnpike, then sped toward Washington, touching his briefcase nervously and looking into the rearview mirror. Two cars filled with heavily armed guards followed closely. Sanderson Hooper beside him and Michael Nordstrom in the rear seat remained speechless.

I'm amazed and disheartened at how quickly adolescents lose their innocence nowadays. Everyone is in such a rush to give themselves over to someone physically without truly knowing the person to whom they are entrusting with their body and emotions

What about free will? . . . There's that too. I never understood why people think they're mutually exclusive. Ask me, our entire lives aren't planned out for us- just some things. Specific events along the way, crossroads we're meant to come to. Tests, maybe, to measure our progress. But we always have choices, and those choices can send us along an unplanned path . . . there are some things that are meant to happen at a certain moment and in a certain way. No matter which path you choose, which decisions you make along your own particular journey, those pivotal moments appear to be set in stone. Maybe they represent the specific lessons we're meant to learn . . . Things we have to face. Things we have to learn. Responsibilities we have to fulfill. And mistakes we have to correct.

Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natural for Lewis to live ordinary life in a supernatural way.

River snickered. “You’re a star of the sea, and my name has no hidden meaning. It makes sense.” “You lost me.” More of our classmates filtered in and took their seats. River leaned so close to me his lips brushed against my ear. “Every river finds its way to the sea. Maybe you’re the sea I was meant to find.

We should never, ever believe life- or history- holds no surprises for us. That way lies arrogance. And arrogance can blind us to the truth . . . Any truth. All truth.

You don’t think I’d throw you in there while you’re conscious do you? I’d never do something so evil.” He drew a heart on my palm with his finger.

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty. I awoke - and found that life was duty.

for now she was not the only one stumbling through the dark looking for an elusive sense of connection with the wider world.

Love until it kills you. Because there's nothing better worth dying for.

So many dead, Grace thought in melancholy wonder, and realised, for perhaps the first time, that there were more dead people in the world than live ones.

Dedicated to anyone who has loved and lost, but found the courage to love again.    

it was Hooper. The big, pale dog stared urgently into Wayne’s face, forepaws on the bed. His damp gaze was unhappy, even stricken.

That would be all nice and simple, wouldn't it? Be good and go to heaven; be bad and go to hell. Black and white. Rules to live by, to keep everybody civilized. But life isn't simple, so I don't know why we expect death to be. What there is . . . is continued existence. Complex, multilayered, and unique to every individual. Just like life is.

I think control is an illusion we build to protect ourselves, and the larger we try to make that circle, the weaker it gets. We can't control our own destinies, much less someone else's. And even the illusion is so fragile, any change can destroy it

Perfect. Then imagine that you started reading the most interesting and fascinating comic book ever created. You fell in love with some characters, you hated others. Endless plots unfolded and every one was an emotional page-turner you couldn't read fast enough because you had to know what was going to happen next. You felt like the world would end if you didn't find out how the story ended. But then you get to the end and there was no end. The author didn't finish it. You don't know if good or evil won. You don't know if the guy got the girl. You don't know any of the answers to all your important questions

The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is mossgrown, and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.

Prince Albert was gazing out of the window into the dark streets. Grace's eyes locked with Prince Albert's and she immediately sank into curtsey. On rising, she blushed to see that he was nodding in acknowledgment and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, she curtseyed again, and while her knee was still bent, the traffic eased and the royal carriage moved off.

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

if I've learned anything through all this, it's that you can't build walls around the people you care about. You can't do it to keep them near or to keep them safe. Even if they could stand the prison, that kind of control is still an illusion. To fate, the walls are made of air

I am drawing a dotted line across our globe, starting from home here, out along what I imagine is your path.

We're all scared most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren't.

If we’re doing we’re living and if we’re living we’re winning, right?

he'd thought of fate as something hostile, a thief moving soundlessly in the night

We all have regrets. Anyone who says they have none is a liar, and anyone who thinks they'll live without acquiring some is a fool.

If you love someone, put their name in a circle; because hearts can be broken, but circles never end.” ~Anonymous

So, who was I now? I was old enough to wear wrinkles and scars, but young enough to feel stronger and smarter because of them

We need to keep an eye on her," Edgar added. Nathan's grip on me tightened. His nectar of the Gods smell intoxicated me. "Are my eyes not fit to watch over her?" Dylan stepped towards us. "It's not that, we don't think-" Nathan didn't let him finish. "I am forever grateful to all of you." He glanced around the room making deliberate eye contact with each person. "However, none of you have any comprehension of my emotions right now. It is my divine right to have time alone with her.

But you have to ignore all of that and work endlessly to make your visions a reality. Stake a claim on your ambitions. If you wait around for other people to define you, you’ll be saddled with their expectations—

Death takes people away from us all our lives. We have to move on. Or die ourselves.

If there is no God, there can be no magic,

I keep your photo in the pocket on the side without the gun. For balance.

Clearly in Bible times, women were used in ministry leadership roles, and still are today.

He said to tell you that when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s a little difficult to remember that your main objective was to drain the swamp.

Without time, nothing happens. Without space, nothing is.

I'm like an old record--Be my guest is the signature song; Please go away, always on side B.

If you love someone, put them in a circle, because hearts can be broken but circles never end.

If it be a sign of mourning," replied Mr. Hooper, "I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.

I have made you some things, for when you get back. I understand now, all the baking you sent me, stale and crumbled in brown paper and rough twine. Now you’re away and I am here. So I will make and make until you get back to remind you, and myself: there are reasons to come home.

He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper. You remember the tiger shark? He had a license plate in his stomach?” “I never saw Jaws. I caught one of the sequels on TV in rehab. The one with Michael Caine.” Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering. “Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.

Our lives are products of our mind. What we are today is a result of what we thought yesterday. What we think today influences what happens to us tomorrow. Our entire lives are products of our mind.

In that night’s dream Etta was swimming or dancing, she couldn’t decide which, but it didn’t matter because they were, really, the same thing, only in swimming the water was your partner, all around, ready, following, light and easy and heavy and comforting and there in your arms and you in its arms and if you opened your mouth to sing along to the music it would rush in and tell you its secrets and taste like wine.

We have a gift beyond measure, the daily bliss of being alive. Forced by our disease to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, like any woman who gives birth, we get to experience the sacredness of life.

our entire lives aren’t planned out for us—just some things. Specific events along the way, crossroads we’re meant to come to. Tests, maybe, to measure our progress. But we always have choices, and those choices can send us along an unplanned path.

The doctrines of Christianity, or the many different theologies, are less true than the true myth because they are only attempts to translate the story, while God has expressed it all more adequately in the real incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

Walter amused them with a story of one of his students who had been caught cheating; the boy wrote some formulas for algebraic equations on his hand, and then rested his cheek in the same hand, as he worked on the exam, only to finish with the inked answers stamped across his face.

The pain bursts through Etta like caffeine,

You can never stop being a mother. Never, never, never.

So to catch a madman, we have to think like a madman?” “I wouldn’t advise it,” Cassie said very quietly. “That abyss is darker and colder than you can even imagine.

so I can vote and then bitch about it later. You can’t really not vote and then bitch about what’s happening. At least as a voter you try to make your voice and opinions heard.

People could say things about Owen. They could. But they don’t. We don’t. Words are strong. The strongest. Worse than bruises on

Toxemia. A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently.

Etta, it could be everything, it could be nothing, what you’re making up. You shouldn’t let that bother you.

The students whipped their heads back to look at her; a blaspheming teacher was as exciting as a fight.

you. They're just looking for a door so they can come back.” “Door?” MacBride was frowning, plainly

members

It took them longer, a week or so, to notice the hole in their language that this new word had made. To grasp that there was no term for a parent without a child, a sister without a sister.

Just as Don Quixote, whose preposterous idealism and touchy pride immediately struck a chord with the Spanish, so Pinocchio speaks to Italians in a very special way as a caricature of many of their national virtues and vices.

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ‘And yet,’ I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding ‘Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes’, ‘and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. ‘Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

The radio was a beautiful thing. It was hodgepodge and patched up on the outside, but on the inside it was filled with voices, filled with people and music and ideas from away, from far away. Otto took a breath and turned it on.

There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms. All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk. We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke? I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’” And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library.

… AND A VOTE OF THANKS Ever since the marauding shark first came to Amity, one man has spent his every waking minute trying to protect his fellow citizens. That man is Police Chief Martin Brody. After the first attack, Chief Brody wanted to inform the public of the danger and close the beaches. But a chorus of less prudent voices, including that of the editor of this newspaper, told him he was wrong. Play down the risk, we said, and it will disappear. It was we who were wrong. Some in Amity were slow to learn the lesson. When, after repeated attacks, Chief Brody insisted on keeping the beaches closed, he was vilified and threatened. A few of his most vocal critics were men motivated not by public-spiritedness but personal greed. Chief Brody persisted, and, once again, he was proven right. Now Chief Brody is risking his life on the same expedition that took the life of Matt Hooper. We must all offer our prayers for his safe return … and our thanks for his extraordinary fortitude and integrity. Brody said aloud, “Thank you, Harry.

We didn’t know it then,' Hooper said. 'We used to talk about how when we got back in the world we were going to do this and we were going to do that. Back in the world we were going to have it made. But ever since then it’s been nothing but confusion.' Hooper took the cigarette case from his pocket but didn’t open it. He leaned forward on the table. 'Everything was clear,' he said. 'You learned what you had to know and you forgot the rest. All this chickenshit. This clutter. You didn’t spend every living minute of the day thinking about your own sorry-ass little self. Am I getting laid enough. What’s wrong with my kid. Should I insulate the fucking house. That’s what does it to you, Porchoff. Thinking about yourself. That’s what kills you in the end.

We didn’t know it then,” Hooper said. “We used to talk about how when we got back in the world we were going to do this and we were going to do that. Back in the world we were going to have it made. But ever since then it’s been nothing but confusion.” Hooper took the cigarette case from his pocket but didn’t open it. He leaned forward on the table. “Everything was clear,” he said. “You learned what you had to know and you forgot the rest. All this chickenshit. This clutter. You didn’t spend every living minute of the day thinking about your own sorry-ass little self. Am I getting laid enough. What’s wrong with my kid. Should I insulate the fucking house. That’s what does it to you, Porchoff. Thinking about yourself. That’s what kills you in the end.