Larsen Quotes

Careful, Mr Larsen, or I’ll think you actually like me.” His mouth curled into a grin. “Baby, we’re way beyond like.

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge.

I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.

What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?

It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.

In Costa Rica, you asked if I'd ever been in love, I said no." "Ask me again." "Have you ever been in love Mr. Larsen?" "Only once" "And you, Princess. Have you ever been in love?" "Only once

When I was young I wanted to be just like him. One of the charm, of a bright orange smile and muscular laughter. Bold brown eyes flashing fearless when he sat not alone on cold blue nights in empty boxcars. Riding a freight train's solitary wail away from Nebraska Depression, accompanying dreams withered farms. Nothing left but the leaves of possibilities.

Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it

It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.

Loving for the second time isn’t sweet; it’s bitter, and hurt more than the first.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

I'll have you know I do the swearing on this ship. If I need your assitance I'll call you." Capt. Wolf Larsen

I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

I'm not such an idiot that I don't realize that if a man calls me a nigger it's his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again.

I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.

I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions

For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.

I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.

Why…” I trailed off again when he fiddled with something on his phone and soft music filled the air. “We never got to dance at the wedding,” he said simply. “You don’t like it when I dance,” I half-joked, trying to hide the emotion welling in my chest. What happened in the library during Nikolai’s reception would forever be etched in my mind. “I love it when you dance. But only with me.” He placed his free hand on the small of my back. “You don’t dance.” “Only with you.” The burn intensified. “Careful, Mr. Larsen, or I’ll think you actually like me.” His mouth curled into a grin. “Baby, we’re way beyond like.

Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.

Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it.

Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.

Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,” Irene demanded, “how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.

And yet she hadn't the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it

To each his own milieu. Enhance what was already in one's possession.

But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.

The great myth of our times is that technology is communication.

She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.

These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destructions.

But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.

Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?

It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for colored.

Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to and hold for definite examination, became almost intolerable. She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in, trapped.

She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

Sometimes at night I would look out and up at the glow rising up around me through the plastic and it would just make me shudder. It reminded me of larvae. We were like pale grubs in our eggs. When I got the horrors like that, I requested a little yellow pill from the dial-a-doc and flopped down into the fuzz along with everyone else.

I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.

Something light and velvety brushed against my heart…and fluttered. Just once, but it was enough for me to identify it. A butterfly. No, no, no. I loved animals, I truly did, but I could not have a butterfly living in my stomach. Not for Rhys Larsen. It needed to die immediately.

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.

Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.

Her reason partly agreed, her instinct wholly rebelled.

I'm human like everybody else. It's just that I'm so tired, so worn out, I can't feel anymore.

We had twenty eight days together but it feels like a lifetime. She’s right, without her it feels like I’m being strangled and fighting for air. I can’t just sit here day after day wishing I could at least see her face. -Colin

Say yes to life, even though you know it may devour you.

It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.

I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room.

In Costa Rica, you asked if I’d ever been in love. I said no.” I lowered my head until our foreheads touched and her lips were scant inches from mine. “Ask me again.” It was the same request I’d made at the hospital, but this time, Bridget didn’t break our gaze as she asked, “Have you ever been in love, Mr. Larsen?” “Only once.” I slid my hand up from her neck to the back of her head, cupping it. “And you, Princess. Have you ever been in love?” “Only once,” she whispered.

Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don't seem to suspect it

I was always an odd child, though I had no idea what odd was, really.

No matter how much darkness life brings, fight, because darkness can't exist without lights. As long as we're alive and trying, we'll get through this hell,

He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn't come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...

I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.

I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.

In Costa Rica, you asked if I’d ever been in love. I said no... Ask me again.” "Have you ever been in love, Mr. Larsen?” “Only once.” “And you, princess. Have you ever been in love?” “Only once,

Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?

Bridget’s eyes shone brighter. “Mr. Larsen, if you make me cry at my own coronation ball, I’ll never forgive you.” My smile widened, and I kissed her, not caring if PDA was against protocol. “Then it’s a good thing I have the rest of our lives to make it up to you.

Изведнъж се замислих как възрастните можеха да задържат чувствата си дълго след като събитието е отминало, много след като са изпратили писмо с извинения и всички останали са продължили нататък. Възрастните бяха събирачи на стари ненужни чувства.

I am the sum of my parts. Everything I’ve ever done and everything I’ve ever achieved and everything I have ever been.

One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!

** The fall semester will offer such classes as Learning When to Shut Up, Asking for Directions, Chick Flicks 101 and The Art of Loading the Dishwasher (Lab Fee Extra)

A text is evolutionary by its very nature.

You were the one choice I made for myself. And that one choice was taken away from me, because the night I realized I was in love with you was the same night you left.

Money's awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, 'Rene, that it's even worth the price.

Love and life sure can be scary. But not living your best life, not loving as hard as you can…what a terrible waste that would be.

If we do it we do it together. You and me against the world Princes

That a man can change himself, improve himself, re-create himself, control his environment, and master his own destiny is the conclusion of every mind who is wide-awake to the power of right thought in constructive action. —LARSEN

Faith was really quite easy. One had only to yield. To ask no questions. The more weary, the more weak, she became, the easier it was. Her religion was to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality.

Be a Flamingo in a flock of Pigeons

Are you mad?” She breathes from behind me. I spin around to face her. “What do you think?” I clip. “That you’re going to save me.” She says quietly.

Spirituality is not about how far up the mountain we get but how many we take with us.

Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

he’s the other half of my heart.” I shrugged a little, knowing it sounded fanciful and romanticized. “I can’t be myself without him.

Sometimes our hearts are wiser than our heads.

Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too.

The sun was crouched on its haunches over the Pioneers. The mountains were both purple and brown, the angle of light hitting the moiré of pine and fir and bleeding out a smoky mirage that made the valley seem to tremble. It was a sight. We both looked.

Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals.

Incited. That was it, the guidingprinciple of her life in Copenhagen. She was incited to make an impression, a voluptous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.

Progression and regression go hand in hand with mental health. It is a tough illness. You often take one step forward and ten steps back.

In the soul there is only the eternal present.

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

I just get a feeling sometimes that everything is predetermined, and I am going through the motions of tracing an existence that will be what it will already be.

She laughed and the ringing bells in her laugh had a hard metallic sound.

She could neither conform nor be happy in her unconformity. This she saw clearly now, and with cold anger at all the past futile effort. What a waste!

I loved her like a sister and we’d known each other since we were babies, but on some level, you couldn’t have found two peas in the same pod that were so completely different. It was almost like opening the pod and finding a pea and a piece of corn.

It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.

Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand. If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards -- many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating -- doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS." I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said. Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte.

Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t “belong.

And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its color, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.

Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.

What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.

She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with.

Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.

Christian lament is not simply complaint. Yes, it stares clear-eyed at awfulness and even wonders if God has gone...Yet at its fullest, biblical lament expresses sorrow over losing a world that was once good alongside a belief that it can be made good again. Lament isn't giving up, it's giving over. When we lift up our sorrow and our pain, we turn it over to the only one who can meet it: our God.

But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.

It’s a slow sultry song. She opens her mouth and what comes out can only be described as dripping with sex. The climax of the song comes and the college boys are cat calling her but she doesn't seem to notice at all. She’s completely in the song, eyes half mast, a slight smile on her lips, and hips methodically rolling to the beat. She’s pure sex and every male in the bar is thinking the same thing I am. What would she be like in my bed. She absent mindedly trails her hand from her collarbone down between her breasts to her belly. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. My jeans instantly get too tight in the crotch and I adjust myself discreetly while everyone’s eyes are still on her.

I’ll never let you go is scrawled three inches long down the side of my ribcage. The skin is still an angry red color, puffy and irritated looking. My gaze drifts up to Colin’s in the mirror. I suck in a sharp breath as I’m caught up in a tornado of emotion. He has the same thing on his arm. They are simple, black ink only, but the meaning of the words are anything but.

Trick.” I say a little louder. “Shhh, sleep baby.” He mumbles. I laugh and smack his arm. “Wake up. I can feel your morning wood.” This gets his attention and he sits up, taking me with him. The arms wrapped around my middle graze my breasts as he shifts up and a tingle shoots straight between my legs. “God, Caroline, I’m so...” He stops, probably realizing that he doesn't have morning wood, “I don't have...” He’s actually pretty cute all sleepy. He laughs. “I know but I couldn't figure out how else to get your attention.” I shrug.

What would we think of people who threw litter on their own front lawns, poured a few cups of sugar in their gas tanks, and then splashed some catsup on their clothes before going to the big interview? Would we say that such behavior is merely foolish or downright dangerous? Would we think of these people as rational? Would rational people sabotage their own well-being, their own possibilities for the future? What would be the point of such behavior? What in the world could they be thinking? What are we thinking when we invest months of effort in our recovery only to let it dribble away? If the meetings are working for us, is it rational to stop going? If we’ve suffered for want of love, isn’t it self-defeating to stop phoning our new friends in the fellowship? Aren’t we sabotaging our own possibilities