Mary Hatch Quotes

It began as most thing begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here comes the villain music, dire warning at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky. It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got an hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you've got a hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

Hippocrates took the no doubt breakfast-inspired view that the egg was simply something for the developing human to eat. He further speculated that as soon as the egg was all eaten up, then the infant would hatch: birth as a sort of grocery-shopping trip.)

George Bailey: Mary Hatch, why in the world did you ever marry a guy like me? Mary: To keep from being an old maid! George Bailey: You could have married Sam Wainright, or anybody else in town... Mary: I didn't want to marry anybody else in town. I want my baby to look like you. George Bailey: You didn't even have a honeymoon. I promised you... [stops] George Bailey: Your what? Mary: My baby! George Bailey: [stuttering] Your, your, your, ba- Mary, you on the nest? Mary: George Baily Lassos Stork! George Bailey: [still stuttering] Lassos a stork? [Mary nods] George Bailey: What're'ya... You mean you're... What is it, a boy or a girl? Mary: [nods enthusiastically] Mmmm-hmmm!

Now, brooder is an interesting word. People who worry a lot in silence are known as brooders. But then again so is a hen sitting on her eggs. The more I get to know chickens, the more I realize half our language comes from chickens. Well, not half. But an awful lot considering this isn't Latin or anything. Cooped up. Egghead. Hatch a plan. Henpecked. Pecker. Cock. Chickenshit. Chicken-scratch. A lot of chicken words are meant to deliver attitude, which isn't surprising to me now that I have chickens. Chickens aren't background animals like fish or sheep or horses. Chickens are in-your-face animals. Chickens if you have them, come to bracket your days. The rooster hollers all morning, and then in the evening the hens have left you their mysterious gift of eggs. Silkies are said to be excellent brooders, to have a tendency toward "broodiness." This, too, is usually meant as a compliment.

As the bankruptcies and embarrassments mounted, Donald was confronted for the first time with the limits of his ability to talk or threaten his way out of a problem. Always adept at finding an escape hatch, he seems to have come up with a plan to betray his father and steal vast sums of money from his siblings.

The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you’ve hatched or heard and branded as true. By wisdom I mean the collective improvements of millions of years of evolution. The mind objects strongly to shit, but the body has no idea what we’re on about.

One thing is for certain: there is no help for any of these poor creatures in the forces of the law. That is horribly demonstrated in the story of a swallow returning from abroad, who had built her nest in the wall of a courtroom and hatched seven eggs there. A serpent came along while the mother was away and devoured all the nestlings. The law might protect the rights of some, so the fable’s moral runs, but not of the poor young swallows, whose murder took place under the judges’ noses. Swallows

Consider the turtle. Perchance you have worried, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seem rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with the turtle’s pace. The young turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience and learns the way of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fail. French empires rise or fall, but the turtle is developed only so fast. What’s a summer? Time for a turtle’s egg to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. They have no worries, have no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as much as for you? —Henry David Thoreau Journal August 28, 1856

Achievement,” once wrote Mary Bell, “is the alcohol of our time.”8 Work is our drug, our numbing agent, escape hatch, and anesthetizing behavior. Achievement makes us feel the semblance of some glow of heightened, idolized identity where we are what we do. In this modern world, we have become addicts to doing, making, producing, and accomplishing.

She’d hatched into this new world of widowhood and wasn’t sure where to turn now for her own personal source of light. Lost without bearings, scrambling madly toward some unseen goal. She no longer trusted her instincts. She didn’t know how to be alone. She was afraid to be the solitary swimmer she’d once been. Brett had changed that in her. She needed the companionship of her friends more than ever.

At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, there are mirrors but, because of the tone of the place, they seem more flirty than licentious. An attractive man glanced at me with a smile and said cutely, Now I can’t go. Soon after, I saw him on the dance floor, whispering to his friend and nodding at me. We all knew he still had to pee. Fleeting, gently pervy interactions like that may be the closest I get to experiencing a sense of gay community. It was last call at the RVT. Famous stole away to the toilets. ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige began to play—a song meant for the start of the night. I danced on my own by the door, near the shelf of condoms and literature. I recalled another time I’d been there recently. I’d given my coat check ticket to the most boyish and poised of the bartenders, the one who moves with a distinct admixture of flirtatiousness and efficiency. He brought my jacket from the cloakroom, the blue nylon I wear when I predict I’ll end up going out, because it promises to wipe clean easily. About to hand it to me over the bar, he said, You know what…and brought himself around the hatch, with shoulders alert like a pantomime butler. He held up my jacket with alacrity to indicate I should turn around so he could slip me into it. I momentarily forgot that I don’t smile in gay bars. He both served and took the upper hand: to get into the jacket, I had to turn my back to him, and yet into the sleeves it was I who inserted. I submitted, but he received. On this night, I glanced over and saw that the bartender was busy, holding someone else’s attention in a brief exchange. He fetched them their extraneous last drink. Famous bounced forth. I caught his eye and pointed my index finger to the speakers. This song, I mouthed. Famous tilted his head. We pushed through the doors into the wind. I’d put my jacket on myself this time, without ceremony. But leaving on a good song also makes a fine exit. Mary J. Blige sang at our backs about starting the party as we took long strides down the street.

But Ulysses caused them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches; and set sail with all possible speed from that baneful coast, lest others after them might taste the lotos, which had such strange qualities to make men forget their native country, and the thoughts of home.

I knew I’d never see my father again after he died. But I asked him every night he spent in his hospice bed to please haunt me or send me signs from the other side. I didn’t realize he was waiting for me on the moon. When I flew there in a hot-air balloon one night, he stood smiling, full -bodied, when I opened the hatch. We bounded together, weightless, marveling at our bare feet caked in gray dust. I woke to the sound of my own laughter, grateful I figured out how to meet him

Elizabeth’s practice to draw hatch marks in pen across the blank spaces of her sensitive and important letters

Always adept at finding an escape hatch, he seems to have come up with a plan to betray his father and steal vast sums of money from his siblings.

Were I to guess,” he said, “I’d say that sai King left those signs and siguls.” “The writer,” Eddie said. He weighed the idea, then nodded slowly. He vaguely remembered a concept from high school—the god from the machine, it was called. There was a fancy Latin term for it as well, but that one he couldn’t remember. Had probably been writing Mary Lou Kenopensky’s name on his desk while the other kids had been obediently taking notes. The basic concept was that if a playwright got himself into a corner he could send down the god, who arrived in a flower-decked bucka wagon from overhead and rescued the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more religious playgoers, who believed that God—not the special-effects version who came down from some overhead platform the audience couldn’t see but the One who wert in heaven—really did save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly gone out of fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular novelists—of the sort sai King seemed on his way to becoming—probably still used the technique, only disguising it better. Little escape hatches. Cards that read GET OUT OF JAIL FREE or ESCAPE THE PIRATES or FREAK STORM CUTS ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION POSTPONED. The god from the machine (who was actually the writer), patiently working to keep the characters safe so his tale wouldn’t end with an unsatisfying line like “And so the ka-tet was wiped out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won, rule Discordia, so sorry, better luck next time (what next time, ha-ha), THE END.” Little safety nets, like a key. Not to mention a scrimshaw turtle. “If he wrote those things into his story,” Eddie said, “it was long after we saw him in 1977.” “Aye,” Roland agreed. “And I don’t think he thought them up,” Eddie said. “Not really. He’s just . . . I dunno, just a . . .” “A bumhug?” Susannah asked, smiling. “No!” Jake said, sounding a little shocked. “Not that. He’s a sender. A telecaster.” He was thinking about his father and his father’s job at the Network.

I set the hot ring down and inspect my hands. They are black. Underneath the black is red from the constant heat; underneath the red is the fine, white cross-hatching of scars which have made a tapestry of my palms. I know I shouldn't, but I like the layering of colors. Three layers, each different. What would you see if you cut me open to the heart?