“
Will rose slowly to his feet. He could not believe he was doing what he was doing, but it was clear that he was, clear as the silver rim around the black of Jem’s eyes. “If there is a life after this one,” he said, “let me meet you in it, James Carstairs.”
“There will be other lives.” Jem held his hand out, and for a moment, they clasped hands, as they had done during their parabatai ritual, reaching across twin rings of fire to interlace their fingers with each other. “The world is a wheel,” he said. “When we rise or fall, we do it together.”
Will tightened his grip on Jem’s hand, which felt thin as twigs in his. “Well, then,” he said, through a tight throat, “since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
“
But what if I make a mistake?' Will asked.
Gilan threw back his head and laughed. 'A mistake? One mistake? You should be so lucky. You'll make dozens! I made four or five on my first day alone! Of course you'll make mistakes. Just don't make any of them twice. If you do mess things up, don't try to hide it. Don't try to rationalize it. Recognize it and admit it and learn from it. We never stop learning, none of us.
”
”
John Flanagan (Erak's Ransom (Ranger's Apprentice, #7))
“
Beetee is still messing round the tree, doing I don't know what. At one point he snaps off a sliver of bark, joins us, and throws it against the force field. It bounces back and lands on the ground, glowing. In a few moments it returns to its original color. "Well, that explains a lot," says Beetee. I look at Peeta and can't help biting my lip to keep from laughing since it explains absolutely nothing to anyone but Beetee.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
“
Well, then, since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3))
“
I slide my feet onto the seat next to him, my ankle brushing against his thigh. “No shallowness of breath? No rapidly beating heart?”
He rests one hand on my foot as he continues to mess with his phone. His eyes meet mine in amusement. “Are those the indicators? I might have an issue after all.
”
”
Kasie West (The Distance Between Us (Old Town Shops, #1))
“
Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It's all a beautiful calamitous mess. It's like the day Mr. James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, "That's it! That's it!" to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.
”
”
Jandy Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere)
“
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
”
”
T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
“
Let be real: We're black kids from one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. All it takes is one of us messing up, and suddenly all of us messed up.
”
”
Angie Thomas (On the Come Up)
“
People are gonna disappoint you sometimes. We’re flawed creatures. Not one of us is perfect, not even you, and you’ve gotta let people mess up and then you’ve gotta forgive them. That’s just life.
”
”
Jenny Han (Shug)
“
People may hate us because of Jesus, but they should never hate Jesus because of us. The way we treat others should lead them to only one conclusion: “If this is how Jesus loves, then I’m in.
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life)
“
One of the stall doors swings open and a fortyish-year-old woman walks out tucking her shirt into her jeans. Her heavy lined eyes land on Seth. "This is the women's restroom." She points a finger to the door. "Can't you read?"
"Can't you see that everyone in this club is about twenty years younger than you?" Seth retorts, turning to the mirror. With his pinkie, he messes with bangs. "Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to have some fun.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden (The Coincidence, #1))
“
All of the emotions that hit people at times like these, all of them, were coursing through us both like a secret we couldn’t tell. Because if we said everything we were thinking and feeling right then…if we laid it all out for one another…we might not like the way the words strung together. Or the way fear and hope and bitterness and love mashed up into one big mess in the pits of our stomachs.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching.
”
”
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist: Essays)
“
Don’t be so hard on yourself, You’re doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - The one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn’t understand. Most of us don’t live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we’re a whole bunch of selves. When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives. You’re just hating the selves you’ve always hated, and loving the ones you’ve always loved. It’s bound to mess you up.
”
”
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
“
None of us is an Amberly, are we?” “I like shocking people too much,” Celeste said with a smile.
“And I’d rather hide than do half the things she has to.” Elise ducked her head.
“I’m too wild.” I shrugged my shoulders, embracing my faults. “I’ll never have her confidence,” Kriss mourned.
“So there. We’re all messed up. But Maxon has to pick one of us, so there’s no point worrying anymore.
”
”
Kiera Cass (The One (The Selection, #3))
“
And Cormia will be okay, I mean, she's not kicked out of here, correct?"
"She shall be welcomed back herein. She is a fine female. Just not...as well suited to this life as some of us are."
In the quiet heartbeats that followed, he had an image of her undressing him for the shower, her guileless, innocent green eyes looking up at him as she fumbled with his belt and his leathers.
She only wanted to do what was right. Back when this whole mess had gotten started, even though she'd been terrified, she would have done the right thing by her tradition and taken him in her. Which made her stronger than him, didn't it. She wasn't running. He was the one with the track shoes on.
"You tell the others I was not worthy of her." As the Directrix's mouth fell open, he pointed a finger at her. "That's a goddamned order. You tell them...she is too good for me. I want her elevated to a special rank.... I want her fucking enshrined, do you understand me? You do right by her or I'll bust this place into ruins.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #6))
“
Life messes us up in so many ways, messes all of us right the hell up. And when we fumble and bumble around, crashing into one another, stepping on toes and hearts, it's not on purpose. Being a person is nearly impossible.
”
”
Lynn Weingarten (Bad Girls with Perfect Faces)
“
In the interest of full disclosure, I stole baby Jesus, and it was definitely to mess with Bronwyn.
”
”
Karen M. McManus (One of Us Is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1))
“
Yeah. And Savitar predates him. He has presided over this council since the very beginning, and notice, Savitar looks about thirty. We don’t know what he is, but he ain’t one of us and he ain’t human. And trust me, you don’t want to mess with him. (Paris)
Thank you for that highly unamusing summation. Next time I have insomnia, I know who to call. In the meantime, little lioness who would probably like to live another year, don’t interrupt me again. I don’t like it and I tend to kill the things I don’t like. (Savitar)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Unleash the Night (Dark Hunter, #8; Were-Hunter, #2))
“
I don’t like big weddings.” Her panic is clear. “All those people make me nervous. I’ll mess up the vows and say something inappropriate.”
“It doesn’t have to be big. It can be just the two of us if you want. We can wait until next summer—or the one after if a year isn’t long enough. We can get married up here by a justice of the peace on the end of the dock at sunset. A damn Rastafarian can perform the ceremony if that’s what you want. I don’t care about the wedding part. All I want to be is connected to you in the most significant way possible. I want you as my wife.
”
”
Helena Hunting (Pucked (Pucked, #1))
“
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.
”
”
Mark Forsyth (The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase)
“
I start to daydream about gravity. Sometimes I wonder if gravity is the problem. It keeps us all grounded, gives us this false sense of stability when really we're just all bodies in motion. Gravity keeps us from floating up into space, it keeps us from involuntarily crashing into one another. It saves the human race from being a big hot mess. I wish gravity would go away and just let us all be a big mess.
”
”
Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
“
Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
It? I ast.
Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.
But what do it look like? I ast.
Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.
Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose. She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate
at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.
Shug! I say.
Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. That's some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like.
God don't think it dirty? I ast.
Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love? and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing. Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. ____s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall.
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere.
Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind,water, a big rock.
But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don't want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
Amen
”
”
Alice Walker (The Color Purple)
“
I guess that sometimes it just takes a long walk through the darkness, a long walk through the darkest shadows and corners of your soul to realize that those are a part of you as well, that you've created through your experiences and thoughts those parts within yourself and as much as you can choose to fear them and repress them, they will require your attention one day, they will need your care and acceptance before you can clean them away and turn the lights on. For you refuse to shine the light on something that is imperfect, because you fear judgement and rejection, but you can always choose to look towards the light as the only source of true beauty and love that can help you in the cleaning process. Healing, after a long time of struggle and mess is a complex process, but a necessary one nevertheless. We are so overwhelmed by the amount of work it requires that we so often choose to run away from the light, hide in our dark corner and hope that we will never be found, hope that we will never be seen, or desperately look outwards for that love and compassion that we can no longer find within ourselves, for our soul's light no longer shines as it used to. And sometimes we just find those people that can see the light beneath all that dust and darkness that's been pilled up, those kind of light workers that understand our broken souls and manage to pick us up and see the beauty within us, when we find it so hard to see it ourselves. Sometimes I get so tired of separation, of division, of groups and different religions and belief systems. Even if you do find the truth, once you've put it into words, books and rules it already becomes distorted by the mind into something that is no longer truth. So I no longer hope for understanding, no longer hope for the opinion of a judgemental mind, but I hope to find the words that touch the soul before the mind, I hope to find the touch that warms the heart from deep inside, and hope to find that far away abandoned part of me which I've left behind.
”
”
Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
“
So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.
I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, 'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'
In balance.'
Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us.'
And what is the deal?' I asked.
We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'
Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'
Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver
“
The pilgrims continue to come. Only God knows what each one of us brings, and with what kind of heart. We come mystically to this cave. We know the mess we bring and the often distracted heart that brings it. But this is all we have--all we are. One stretches out his arms to receive.
”
”
M. Basil Pennington (Journey in a Holy Land: A Spiritual Journal)
“
It’s time to stop allowing people to blame the woman for everything. As women, we try to figure out what they need, what they want; and the entire time we’re stressing ourselves out and they don’t give a shit as long as it’s done. Hell, no. Timeout for that too! We do not give a rat’s ass anymore—they are quick to blame us for their mess-ups and think we are supposed to make magic happen. It is time to let them deal with it and figure out how they are going to mend their shit. If they want to blame us, let them, who cares? Their shit isn’t our problem.
Go ahead, blame the women. We are holding up the peace sign, smiling and laughing, feeling good as we press forward!
We are free and feel refreshed. It feels good to be the last ones standing. We look at life totally differently, and we now see that it’s okay to be a little rough around the edges.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
“
I have no quarrel with you,” Viktor said, speaking to the four men that came to Chris and Alex’s side. “I have no interest in fighting any of you. My enemy is only Christopher Adams.”
“That’s the thing,” Neriah said. “You mess with one of us...”
“…you mess with all of us,” Hadrian finished with a smirk.
”
”
S.F. Mazhar (The Elementals (Power of Four #0.5))
“
Of course, in a hundred years, no one will remember any of us and our story will be lost in obscurity, but for us, for all these years when we were kids and then grown-ups, when you were young parents and then grandparents, this is the only story that ever mattered, and it was such a marvelous one. The best story I ever imagined.
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life)
“
Like the lotus flower, business blooms in the mud, and in the dark of night. The lotus is an amazing creation of God, because for all of its beauty, it is the sum total of work performed in a mess. It is also a creation that has the ability to create seeds in its habitat for a very long time without help from human hands. The lotus has the ability to survive beyond the mercurial nature of weather (storms, frost). The lotus is one strong, powerful, and resilient flower that blossoms in a substance (mud) that none of us would want to touch.
”
”
Robin Caldwell (When Women Become Business Owners (A Stepping Into Victory Compilation, #1))
“
You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to greive over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
I've thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?
Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours.
The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
“
Please forgive me for fighting against us, Gavin. Please forgive me for not fighting for us when I knew we were supposed to be together. Forgive me for being the weak mess I am. But more than anything… thank you for loving me. Thank you for your dimpled smile and your bottle caps. I’ll never be able to look at one without thinking of you. Thank you for your stupid Yankees and your wiseass remarks. Thank you for wanting late night drives and sunset-watching with me. Thank you for wanting the good, the bad, and the in-between.
”
”
Gail McHugh (Pulse (Collide, #2))
“
It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation. I wonder what the future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered through the Depression, World War II, then came home to build the greatest middle class in human history. Lord knows they weren't perfect, but they sure came closest to the American dream. Then my parents' generation came along and f***ed it all up - the baby boomers, the "me" generation. And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the Zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. 'Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.
”
”
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
“
And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. "Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.
”
”
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
“
Men came in and dragged us apart. It took us five minutes to bring Nora to. She sat up holding her cheek and looked around the room until she saw Morelli, nippers on one wrist, standing between two detectives. Morelli's face was a mess: the coppers had worked him over a little just for the fun of it. Nora glared at me. "You damned fool," she said, "you didn't have to knock me cold. I knew you'd take him, but I wanted to see it."
One of the coppers laughed. "Jesus," he said admiringly, "there's a woman with hair on her chest.
”
”
Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man)
“
Eventually, I developed my own image of teh "befriending" impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I-- fearful of what I might hear or arrogantly trying to live wihtout help or simply too busy with my ideas and ego and ethics to bother-- ignored teh shouts and walked away.
So this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer and shouted more loudly, but AI kept walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder, but I walked on. Frustrated by my unresponsiveness, the figure threw stones at my back, then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my attention. But despite teh pain, I kept walking away.
Over teh years, teh befriending intent of this figure never disapppeared but became obscured by the frustration cuased by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, "What do you want?" When I was finally able to make the turn-- and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me-- I began to get well.
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God's own image-- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.
”
”
Parker J. Palmer (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation)
“
Women of color declaring to white women, I'm not here to clean up your mess, carry your spear, hold your hand, or cheer you on while I suffer in silence. I'm not here to raise your children, assuage your guilt, build your platforms, or fight your battles. I'm here for my community because no one else will stand up for us but us
”
”
Mikki Kendall (Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot)
“
She pressed her hands against my chest and tried to push me away. "I can't think straight when you 're this close."
I backed her up against the wall. "I don't like the thoughts running through your head. I plan on staying here until you look me in the eye and tell me you 're mine."
"This isn't going to work. It never would have."
"Bullshit. We belong together." Echo sniffed and the sound tore at me. I softened my voice. "Look at me, baby. I know you love me. Three nights ago you were willing to offer everything to me. There is no way you can walk away from us."
"God Noah..." Her voice broke. "I'm a mess."
A mess? "You 're beautiful."
"I'm a mental mess. In two months you 're going to face some judge and convince him that you are the best person to raise your brothers. I'm a liability."
"Not true. My brothers will love you and you 'll love them. You are not a liability."
"But how will the judge see me? Are you really willing too take that risk? [...] What happens if the judge find out about me? What if he discovers what a mess you 're dating?"
Breathing became a painful chore. Her lips turned down while her warm fingers caressed my cheek. That touch typically brought me to knees, but now it cut me open.
"Did you know that when you stop being stubborn and accept i may be right on something, your eyes widen a little and you tilt your head to the side?" she asked.
I forced my head straight and narrowed my eyes. "I love you."
She flashed her glorious smile and then it became the saddest smile in the world. "You love your brothers more. I'm okay with that. In fact, it's one of the things i love about you. You were right the other day. I do want to be a part of a family. But i'd never forgive myself if i was the reason you didn't get yours."
To my horror, tears pricked my eyes and my throat swelled shut. "No, you 're not pulling this sacrificial bullshit on me. I love you and you love me and we 're supposed to be together."
Echo pressed her body to mine and her fingers clung to my hair. Water glistened in her eyes. "I love you enough to never make you choose."
She pushed off her toes toward me, guiding my head down, and gently kissed my lips. No. This wouldn't be goudbye. I'd fill her up and make her realize she'd always be empty without me.
I made Echo mine. My hands claimed her hair, her back. My lips claimed her mouth, her tongue. Her body shook against mine and i tasted salty wetness on her skin. She forced her lips away and i latched tighter to her. "No, baby, no," i whispered into her hair.
She pushed her palms against my chest, then became a blur as she ran past. "I'm sorry.
”
”
Katie McGarry (Pushing the Limits (Pushing the Limits, #1))
“
And I am sorry, but saying everything will be all right while continuing doing nothing at all is just not hopeful to us. In fact, it's the opposite of hope. And yet this is exactly what you keep doing. You can't just sit around waiting for hope to come - you're acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don't seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn. And if you still say that we are wasting valuable lesson time, then let me remind you that our political leaders have wasted decades through denial and inaction. And since our time is running out we have decided to take action. We have started to clean up your mess and we will not stop until we are done.
”
”
Greta Thunberg (No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (Green Ideas))
“
GO BACK TO DALLAS!” the man sitting somewhere behind us yelled again, and the hold Aiden still had on the back of my neck tightened imperceptibly.
“Don’t bother, Van,” he demanded, pokerfaced.
“I’m not going to say anything,” I said, even as I reached up with the hand furthest away from him and put it behind my head, extending my middle finger in hopes that the idiot yelling would see it.
Those brown eyes blinked. “You just flipped him off, didn’t you?”
Yeah, my mouth dropped open. “How do you know when I do that?” My tone was just as astonished as it should be.
“I know everything.” He said it like he really believed it.
I groaned and cast him a long look. “You really want to play this game?”
“I play games for a living, Van.”
I couldn’t stand him sometimes. My eyes crossed in annoyance. “When is my birthday?”
He stared at me.
“See?”
“March third, Muffin.”
What in the hell?
“See?” he mocked me.
Who was this man and where was the Aiden I knew?
“How old am I?” I kept going hesitantly.
“Twenty-six.”
“How do you know this?” I asked him slowly.
“I pay attention,” The Wall of Winnipeg stated.
I was starting to think he was right.
Then, as if to really seal the deal I didn’t know was resting between us, he said, “You like waffles, root beer, and Dr. Pepper. You only drink light beer. You put cinnamon in your coffee. You eat too much cheese. Your left knee always aches. You have three sisters I hope I never meet and one brother. You were born in El Paso. You’re obsessed with your work. You start picking at the corner of your eye when you feel uncomfortable or fool around with your glasses. You can’t see things up close, and you’re terrified of the dark.” He raised those thick eyebrows. “Anything else?”
Yeah, I only managed to say one word. “No.” How did he know all this stuff? How? Unsure of how I was feeling, I coughed and started to reach up to mess with my glasses before I realized what I was doing and snuck my hand under my thigh, ignoring the knowing look on Aiden’s dumb face. “I know a lot about you too. Don’t think you’re cool or special.”
“I know, Van.” His thumb massaged me again for all of about three seconds. “You know more about me than anyone else does.”
A sudden memory of the night in my bed where he’d admitted his fear as a kid pecked at my brain, relaxing me, making me smile. “I really do, don’t I?”
The expression on his face was like he was torn between being okay with the idea and being completely against it.
Leaning in close to him again, I winked. “I’m taking your love of MILF porn to the grave with me, don’t worry.”
He stared at me, unblinking, unflinching. And then: “I’ll cut the power at the house when you’re in the shower,” he said so evenly, so crisply, it took me a second to realize he was threatening me…
And when it finally did hit me, I burst out laughing, smacking his inner thigh without thinking twice about it. “Who does that?”
Aiden Graves, husband of mine, said it, “Me.”
Then the words were out of my mouth before I could control them. “And you know what I’ll do? I’ll go sneak into bed with you, so ha.”
What the hell had I just said? What in the ever-loving hell had I just said?
“If you think I’m supposed to be scared…” He leaned forward so our faces were only a couple of inches away. The hand on my neck and the finger pads lining the back of my ear stayed where they were. “I’m not
”
”
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
“
You know, Bob, school is school, one of those life experiences we kids all have to get through in order to become you. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about, especially while we're cleaning up your little messes: toxic waste, war, bank bailouts. Honestly, if we ran up debt the way you guys do? You'd ground us, take away our cells, and make us clean toilets with a toothbrush until we'd pay back every penny.
”
”
Ilsa J. Bick (Drowning Instinct)
“
It’s all so messed up. I think what it is, is that when I was young, my mother was her best version of herself. And here I am, now, a shitty grown-up, and messing it all up, and a disappointment. What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person. Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.
”
”
Rachel Khong (Goodbye, Vitamin)
“
The best thing I can say to you is that we are not only one thing forever. We’re allowed to change at any point in our lives. We don’t have to be stuck with a label someone else assigns us. Gods, we don’t even have to stick to a label we give ourselves. So, you can be bi or pan or a lesbian or queer, and tomorrow you may have a better sense of who you are, or tomorrow you can be a big ole queer mess and figure it out fifty years from now.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure (Camp Half-Blood Chronicles, #17))
“
We created Him, yes. The Neon God is our mess. Our digital hive-mind. Our A.I.,’ said Aurora, watching the man absent-mindedly gape at the ceiling. ‘We built Him to manage our finances, our logistics, our armies, our wealth distribution…. and… and He went crazy.
'Because we filled Him with crappy commercials and stopped maintaining His morals. He’s only like this because of us, all of us. It’s His Algorithm – the one you wrote, the one you keep feeding to Him – we need to watch out for. That’s the Neon God’s soul. That’s His Justice.
”
”
Louise Blackwick (5 Stars)
“
Why? I mean, if your Infinite is the Creator—the one true God—then why can’t He simply say, ‘Listen, mortals, everyone behave!’ and have them be perfect? Why drag you into this mess?” Ela prayed to the Infinite for words, then spoke carefully. “Because He loves us. And love does not demand enslavement, but . . . love desires a partnership. Our Creator seeks true communication between us and Him. He won’t force anyone to love Him. We decide for ourselves.
”
”
R.J. Larson (Prophet (Books of the Infinite, #1))
“
I want you, Indy. I want us. I want our little life we’ve built even when we thought we were pretending. I want you in our house because you’ve made it a home. I want your mess and your chaos. I want your genuine smiles, the ones you wear when you’re around my sister, the hockey team, and me. I want you happy, and I want to be the reason you are. I want you to choose me.
”
”
Liz Tomforde (The Right Move (Windy City, #2))
“
God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
Now when God plays "hide" and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself! But that's the whole fun of it-just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But- when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will WAKE UP, stop pretending, and REMEMBER that we are all one single Self- the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever.
You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards and play again, and so it goes with the world.
”
”
Alan W. Watts (A. Book)
“
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness. Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out. Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
”
”
Shaun Usher (Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Circulation)
“
Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
”
”
E.B. White
“
There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away.
Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality.
They were in conversation without speaking. They didn't need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken.
One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done?
One said, It will have to be done. There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure.
It said this with satisfaction.
One said, Besides... there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact.
One said, He has worked inefficiently?
One said, No. We can't get him there.
One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don't want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people?
One said, Got a crush on them, that sort of thing?
One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No.
One said, Sorry. Just my little joke.
One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Such speculation is dangerous.
One said, No argument there.
One said, Then we are agreed?
One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. Did you not just use the singular pronoun "my?" Not developing a personality, are you?
One said, guiltily, Who? Us?
One said, Where there is personality, there is discord.
One said, Yes. Yes. Very true.
One said, All right. But watch it in future.
One said, Then we are agreed?
They looked up at the face of Azrael, outlined against the sky. In fact, it was the sky.
Azrael nodded, slowly.
One said, Very well. Where is this place?
One said, It is the Discworld. It rides through space on the back of a giant turtle.
One said, Oh, one of that sort. I hate them.
One said, You're doing it again. You said "I."
One said, No! No! I didn't! I never said "I!"... oh, bugger...
It burst into flame and burned in the same way that a small cloud of vapor burns, quickly and with no residual mess. Almost immediately, another one appeared. It was identical in appearance to its vanished sibling.
One said, Let that be a lesson. To become a personality is to end. And now... let us go.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2))
“
Ms. Terwilliger didn’t have a chance to respond to my geological ramblings because someone knocked on the door. I slipped the rocks into my pocket and tried to look studious as she called an entry. I figured Zoe had tracked me down, but surprisingly, Angeline walked in.
"Did you know," she said, "that it’s a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?"
I closed my eyes and silently counted to five before opening them again. “Please tell me you haven’t eviscerated someone.”
She shook her head. “No, no. I left my biology homework in Miss Wentworth’s room, but when I went back to get it, she’d already left and locked the door. But it’s due tomorrow, and I’m already in trouble in there, so I had to get it. So, I went around outside, and her window lock wasn’t that hard to open, and I—”
"Wait," I interrupted. "You broke into a classroom?"
"Yeah, but that’s not the problem."
Behind me, I heard a choking laugh from Ms. Terwilliger’s desk.
"Go on," I said wearily.
"Well, when I climbed through, I didn’t realize there was a bunch of stuff in the way, and I crashed into those plastic models of the human body she has. You know, the life size ones with all the parts inside? And bam!" Angeline held up her arms for effect. "Organs everywhere." She paused and looked at me expectantly. "So what are we going to do? I can’t get in trouble with her."
"We?" I exclaimed.
"Here," said Ms. Terwilliger. I turned around, and she tossed me a set of keys. From the look on her face, it was taking every ounce of self-control not to burst out laughing. "That square one’s a master. I know for a fact she has yoga and won’t be back for the rest of the day. I imagine you can repair the damage—and retrieve the homework—before anyone’s the wiser.”
I knew that the “you” in “you can repair” meant me. With a sigh, I stood up and packed up my things. “Thanks,” I said.
As Angeline and I walked down to the science wing, I told her, “You know, the next time you’ve got a problem, maybe come to me before it becomes an even bigger problem.”
"Oh no," she said nobly. "I didn’t want to be an inconvenience."
Her description of the scene was pretty accurate: organs everywhere. Miss Wentworth had two models, male and female, with carved out torsos that cleverly held removable parts of the body that could be examined in greater detail. Wisely, she had purchased models that were only waist-high. That was still more than enough of a mess for us, especially since it was hard to tell which model the various organs belonged to.
I had a pretty good sense of anatomy but still opened up a textbook for reference as I began sorting. Angeline, realizing her uselessness here, perched on a far counter and swing her legs as she watched me. I’d started reassembling the male when I heard a voice behind me.
"Melbourne, I always knew you’d need to learn about this kind of thing. I’d just kind of hoped you’d learn it on a real guy."
I glanced back at Trey, as he leaned in the doorway with a smug expression. “Ha, ha. If you were a real friend, you’d come help me.” I pointed to the female model. “Let’s see some of your alleged expertise in action.”
"Alleged?" He sounded indignant but strolled in anyways.
I hadn’t really thought much about asking him for help. Mostly I was thinking this was taking much longer than it should, and I had more important things to do with my time. It was only when he came to a sudden halt that I realized my mistake.
"Oh," he said, seeing Angeline. "Hi."
Her swinging feet stopped, and her eyes were as wide as his. “Um, hi.”
The tension ramped up from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds, and everyone seemed at a loss for words. Angeline jerked her head toward the models and blurted out. “I had an accident.”
That seemed to snap Trey from his daze, and a smile curved his lips. Whereas Angeline’s antics made me want to pull out my hair sometimes, he found them endearing.
”
”
Richelle Mead (The Fiery Heart (Bloodlines, #4))
“
Who else knows about this besides us?”
“Just Patti...”
“Okay. That should be okay. Is that it?”
“And Kaidan,” I added. My eyes darted everywhere but his face. I was in for it.
“Who?” There was an edge to his voice.
His eyes searched mine. I didn't want to tell him a single thing about Kaidan. I knew how it would sound. I took my hands from his, pulling the braid over my shoulder to mess with it.
“He's my friend. He's the one who drove me here to see you.”
“You told some human kid?”
I coughed, buying time. “He's Neph, too.”
Jonathan LaGray went rigid and his ruddy cheeks paled. I squirmed as his eyes bored into mine.
“Which one's his father?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“Richard Rowe. I guess you'd know him as Pharzuph.”
Oh, boy. He wasn't pale anymore.
“You came across the country—”
“Shhh!” I warned him as people looked over. He lowered his voice to a shouted whisper.
“-with the son of the Duke of Lust? Son of a—”
He pounded a fist down on the table and a guard stepped toward us. I waved and nodded at the man, trying to reassure him it was fine, and my father pulled his balled hands down into his lap. After a moment the guard walked back to the wall and looked away.
“Don't worry!” I whispered. “I told you; we're just friends.”
He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with his fingers to calm his temper.
“You tell him that his father is never to know about you or whatever Sister Ruth tells you. Understand?”
“He would never tell his father anything. But, um...” I swallowed. “Unfortunately, Pharzuph already knows about me.”
His eyes flashed red again and it nearly stopped my heart. I pressed my back into the seat, causing it to wobble.
“Aren't you worried people will see your eyes when you do that?” I asked, sure that my own eyes were gigantic at that moment.
“Humans can't see it. And don't try to change the subject. I know Pharzuph,” he growled. “He's a real bastard on earth and in hell. He'd do anything to gain favour.”
“Kaidan thinks he'll forget about me if I lie low.”
“Maybe momentarily, while he's busy or distracted with his work, but you'll cross his mind again someday.
”
”
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
“
In decades from now, I’m sure they’ll say we Joes were all noble, every one of us grimy but patriotic cherubs. Because we won a war. Back home they already do think it, thanks to the publicity teams, the ads, correspondents, censors. I’m not buying it. If we have to come here and fight to do away with your Hitler and the sorry mess he created, then people ought to know just how much the effort sucks all our souls. That way, maybe no one will try a war again.
”
”
Steve Anderson (Under False Flags)
“
As we stepped into the large mess hall, a band began to play "The Star Spangled Banner," and Old Glory was unfurled before us. I came undone. I couldn't help it; I began to sob. This was the first American flag we had seen in years. No one who had not experienced the past four years with us could understand what it meant to see that flag and hear that song. I thought my heart would burst within me with pride and with the first-born feeling of being really free!
”
”
Darlene Deibler Rose (Evidence Not Seen: A Woman's Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War II)
“
Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.
“But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.” (pp.115-6)
”
”
Jay Rayner (Eating Crow: A Novel of Apology)
“
It is incredibly tempting to disparage people who didn’t “change” with us. I have criticized the words of others when the same words came out of my own mouth just two years earlier, which is incredibly un-self-aware. Human insecurity wants everyone right where we are, in the same head space at the same time. We want to progress (and digress) at a comparable rate: Everyone be into this thing I’m into! Except when I’m not. Then everyone be cool. We need to get better at permission and grace. What is right for us may not be right for everyone, and we don’t have to burn down the house simply because we’ve moved our things out. Other good folks probably still live there, and until one minute ago, we did too.
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life)
“
People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists.
“…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…”
What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.
I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me.
“The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened.
“I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
”
”
Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
“
The only love story I know, is the one I happen to live inside everyday. Your path towards certainty, if that's even what you're after, will look different from mine. Just as your conception of home and who belongs there with you, will always be unique to you. Only slowly do most of us figure out what we need in intimate relationships and what we're able to give to them. We practice, we learn, we mess up. We sometimes acquire tools that don't actually serve us. ...we obsess, overthink and misplace our energy...we retreat when hurt, we armor up when scared, we might attack when provoked, or yield when ashamed.
”
”
Michelle Obama (The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times)
“
These are things I can't change. Not one of them. Can't fix, can't heal, can't put the broken pieces back together. But what I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and the mess. That's all any of us can do. That's what we're here for. Not the battle lines, keeping people in and out. Not the "pro" and "anti" stances, but the presence, the listening, the praying with and for on the days when it all falls apart, when life shatters in our hands.
”
”
Shauna Niequist (Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes)
“
Computers thwart, contort, and befuddle us. We mess around with fonts, change screen backgrounds, slow down or increase mouse speed. We tweak and we piddle. We spend countless hours preparing PowerPoint slides that most people forget in seconds. We generate reports in duplicate and triplicate and then somw that end up serving only one function for most of the recipients - to collect dust.
”
”
Jeff Davidson (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Things Done)
“
Stop. You can’t love me because you’re lonely, or because I am the only one who doesn’t piss you off. I want to piss you off, I want to get on your fucking nerves. I don’t want the responsibility of always being your rock. I will try, but I’m a mess, too. I lie, I sleep too much and I don’t like children under the age of 6, really. I don’t even know if I want kids because I’m selfish, and mothers can’t be selfish once they decide to carry another life.
I’m always looking for the rain to come so I trip over my own feet. I know exactly what the air smells like before a storm.
Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that I cry a lot because it feels good, and I masturbate at least 4 times a week, and you might fall out of love with me before either of us are ready for it.
I have no experience with this. I’m trying to be brave and smart but its almost impossible to be both at the same time.
You can’t love me like a fire escape. Sometimes I will be the match, or the smoke under the door. I don’t know what I’m doing, all I know is that we all catch fire sometimes, before we even get warm.
Before you fall in love with me, I want you to know that there’s a 50% chance that this won’t work, that one of us will wind up hating the other. I will try to keep your head above water, but sometimes I’ll need help, too.
I can’t be your savior, and I don’t expect you to be mine. Just watch me unfold and I’ll watch you unfold, too. We’ll get drunk and tell each other everything. I know that’s cheating but maybe it’ll be alright. Maybe we won’t wake up embarrassed.
I am going to fall in love with you, too, feet first. Maybe we’ll slow dance off a building together, maybe we’ll have forgotten each other’s names by this time next year. I don’t care, the sky is gray with or without you, so I’m not going to look up anymore, I’m going to look ahead .
”
”
Caitlyn S.
“
You’re the love of my life Liv. I thought I could have that in half measures with us just being friends. I thought it would be enough, but it’s not. I want all of you. I’ve wanted all of you for a long fucking time, and I just wasn’t honest about it. With you or with myself. But I’m here now. I’m sorry I made a mess of everything. I’m sorry I was the stubborn one. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you sooner, that I didn’t give you what you deserved when you asked for it. But I love you, and if you give me another shot I will spend every minute making it up to you.
”
”
Maggie Rawdon (Delay of Game (Plays & Penalties, #2))
“
That is the heavenly Father's deepest impulse toward us. You are the apple of His eye. And anyone who messes with you messes with Him. His protective instincts are most poignantly seen at the cross - the place where unconditional love and omnipotent power for the amalgam called amazing grace. That's where the Creator stepped between every fallen sinner and the fallen angel, Satan. That's where the Advocate took His stand against the Accuser of the brethren. The Sinless Son of God took the fall for us.
The cross is God's way of saying, "You are worth dying for.
”
”
Mark Batterson (All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life)
“
I thought love was a fascination, or a desire to be around someone, or wanting to make them happy. I believed it just happened, like a slap to the face, and left the way the sting from such a blow fades. That’s why it was easy for me to believe it could be false or manipulated or influenced by magic.
Until I met you, I didn’t understand to feel loved, one has to feel known. And that, outside of my family, I had never really loved because I hadn’t bothered to know the other person. But I know you. And you have to come back to me, Wren, because no one gets us but us. You know why you’re not a monster, but I might be. I know why throwing me in your dungeon meant there was still something between us. We are messes and we are messed up and I don’t want to go through this world without the one person I can’t hide from and who can’t hide from me.
”
”
Holly Black (The Prisoner’s Throne (The Stolen Heir Duology, #2))
“
Surely the heart is not a fitting place to house hatred. But where is its place? I don't know. That is one of the universe's Unknowns. It would seem that the God's truly delight in messing things up, for in not having created a particular spot to house hatred, they have provoked eternal chaos. Hatred us forever hunting down a refuge, poking it's nose where it shouldn't, taking over sites reserved for others, invariably forcing out love.
”
”
Laura Esquivel (The Law of Love)
“
I understand it was Derian who spoiled everything. He purposefully tainted your view of me and forced you to go along with him. I know none of what happened was your idea or your desire, Eena.”
She didn’t get up, but spoke from her curled position. Her voice was weak, still heavy with despair. “Derian didn’t force me to do anything.”
“But if he hadn’t influenced you, we would be enjoying a pleasant dinner again, telling stories and laughing. I’m sure that would be the case. You would be happy……and so would I.”
Eena chuckled without amusement.
“You have to admit we shared some very enjoyable evenings, didn’t we? There’s really no reason we can’t put this whole mess behind us and start from where we left off.” He sounded genuinely serious.
“You forget,” she reminded him, “I heard your conversation with the Ghengats. This isn’t about Derian, it’s about you.”
“Alright,” he admitted with an acquiescent sigh, “so I’m not everything you’d hoped for. But really, what man can ever live up to any woman’s terribly high expectations?”
This got her attention. She almost stood up to face him, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Leaning forward, she retorted, “Expecting a man to respect you, to be honest with you, and, oh yes, to not be a shameless murderer—I don’t think those are overly high expectations!”
He shrugged, casually excusing his faults. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“What do you want?” she finally asked, exasperated.
He squatted to her level and stated his desire. “I want you.”
Eena thought the expression on his face—the look in his weary blue eyes—appeared strangely sincere. But there was one thing she had learned from all this: never trust a master of deceit.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Eena, The Dawn and Rescue (The Harrowbethian Saga #1))
“
There, I saw Adam messing around with a container of tic tacs. I had found the source of the cinnamon taste of his kisses. He looked up.
"Want one?" he offered.
"Sure, thanks," I replied. He proceeded to knock exactly one tic tac into his palm and hand it to me. "Are you sure you can spare this?" I asked solemnly.
"How many did you want?"
"Well, more than one. Who gives somebody one tic tac? Would it kill to be a little more generous? some psychologist somewhere probably has some theory about one tic tac givers and fear of commitment."
"Fear of commitment, my ass. You should be committed, you loon. If you were intended to have more than one tic tac, they would have just made tic tacs bigger. This is regulation sized tic tac, and it should be more than enough to satisfy your breath freshening needs," he said, sounding affronted.
"A tic tac is not merely a breath freshener, it is a candy," I pointed out, voice rising in anger. Who was he calling a loon? "And they make them small on purpose, so you'll think you're getting more, and so you'll run out faster when someone asks for one, and you will give them a few!"
"Why would someone ask for A tic tac when they really wanted several tic tacs? What does that say about their psychology?! Why not be honest from the get-go about what you want?!" he shouted back at me.
" I didn't ask for one! You offered me one, God damn it!"
"And as for your other points, it is primarily a breath freshener, and maybe you should alert the media about your great tic tac size conspiracy!"
"I can't believe we're fighting about motherfucking tic tacs!" I screamed and the two of us glowered each other across my desk for several seconds before smiles slowly appeared on both of our faces.
"Want to have make-up sex?" he asked.
"Yeah, let's go," I said, getting up and heading for the bedroom.
”
”
N.M. Silber (Legal Briefs (Lawyers in Love, #3))
“
One more second and he would’ve hit you with the gun. And who knows what else. When I think about what could’ve happened . . .” He gripped her shoulders determinedly. “I should’ve told you this earlier, Jordan. Now that I’ve got my chance, you’re going to hear it whether you like it or not. You came into my life and messed the whole thing up and now I’m screwed. Because I’m in love with you. As in balls-out, head-over-heels, watching-Dancing-with-the-Stars -on-Monday-nights, wine-and-bubble-bath kind of love. Hell, I think I’d even wear a scarf indoors for you.”
Jordan smiled, her eyes misty, as she touched his cheek. “That’s the best kind of love.
”
”
Julie James (A Lot like Love (FBI/US Attorney, #2))
“
When I heard Good News’s account of her life, I mentally began to formulate questions that start with the words “Why don’t you . . . ,” followed by a description of what—in our view—one should do in this sort of situation. My lips were on the point of producing one of these impertinent “why don’t yous” when I bit my tongue. That’s just what the color magazines do—just for a moment I’d wanted to be like them: they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt. So I didn’t say a word. Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
“
Books on one shelf, a small collection of old titles. Isak Dinesen, bound in leather. Alice in Wonderland, in an old illustrated edition. The kind of things someone kept to show visitors how smart they were. Accessories to identity. But one book—a copy of Cadillac Desert, old. He reached for it. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s a signed first.” Angel smirked. “ ’Course it is.” Then: “My boss makes all her new hires read that. She likes us to see this mess isn’t an accident. We were headed straight to Hell, and didn’t do anything about it.
”
”
Paolo Bacigalupi (The Water Knife)
“
It’s a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky-wet of blood and afterbirth, mother wailing, child crying … the helpless soft spot at the top of its head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Our parents and teachers say it’s a miracle, but it’s not. It’s going to happen no matter what, there’s no choice in the matter. To my mind, a miracle is something that could go one way or another. The fact that something happens, when by all rights it shouldn’t, is what makes us take notice, it’s what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that’s made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead … that’s the miracle.
”
”
Ami McKay (The Birth House)
“
Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes.
The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives.
What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
”
”
Ronald Wright (A Short History of Progress)
“
What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions -the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.
I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both -Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with a surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me.
"The irony," he said, "... is that now that I'm this blind man, it's clearer to me now then it's ever been before. What's the line? 'Was blind but now I see...' " He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away.
"You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought ...said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed-up phone message...
That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness -that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy."
"I know what you mean," I said.
His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me.
"No you don't," he said. "You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you're afraid."
"I'm not afraid. It's more like ..." I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened.
"l'll give you what I learned from all this," he said. "Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
”
”
Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
“
When we entered the material world, God lent us a body to act as a vessel and encase our souls. Our body is our temple and, miraculously, it is in a state of constant renewal.
Fat cells are replaced at the rate of 10% each year. Skin cells are renewed every two to four weeks. Our 9,000 taste buds are renewed every 10-14 days. Our skeleton is renewed every two years. Every day billions of cells replace the ones that came before them. We are in this miracle of creation and renewal every second of our lives… unless we mess up that renewal.
God not only gave us a constantly renewing body, but he also provided a profoundly rich, diverse and constantly-renewing food supply.
”
”
Celso Cukierkorn (The Miracle Diet: Lose Weight, Gain Health... 10 Diet Skills)
“
So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.'…
"'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to CAUSE them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance…. Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with US…. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'…
"'Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'
"'Exactly like that. "Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one."'…
"It's a good idea,' I said. 'Especially since we're still here sleeping on God's couch. We're permanent houseguests.'
"'Yep, we are. Better remember how to put everything back how we found it.'
It was a new angle on religion, for me. I felt a little embarrassed for my blunt interrogation. And the more I thought about it, even more embarrassed for my bluntly utilitarian culture. 'The way they tell it to us Anglos, God put the earth here for us to use, westward-ho. Like a special little playground.'
"Loyd said, 'Well, that explains a lot.'…
"'But where do you go when you've pissed in every corner of your playground?'...
"To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
“
New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.
I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains.
Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school.
Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix.
Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.
”
”
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
“
When I’m sitting by my gay friends in church, I hear everything through their ears. When I’m with my recently divorced friend, I hear it through hers. This is good practice. It helps uncenter us (which is, you know, the whole counsel of the New Testament) and sharpens our eye for our sisters and brothers. It trains us to think critically about community, language, felt needs, and inclusion, shaking off autopilot and setting a wider table. We must examine who is invited, who is asked to teach, who is asked to contribute, who is called into leadership. It is one thing to “feel nice feelings” toward the minority voice; it is something else entirely to challenge existing power structures to include the whole variety of God’s people. This is not hard or fancy work. It looks like diversifying small groups and leadership, not defaulting to homogeny as the standard operating procedure. Closer in, it looks like coffee dates, dinner invites, the warm hand of friendship extended to women or families outside your demographic. It means considering the stories around the table before launching into an assumed shared narrative. It includes the old biblical wisdom on being slow to speak and quick to listen, because as much as we love to talk, share, and talk-share some more, there is a special holiness reserved for the practice of listening and deferring.
”
”
Jen Hatmaker (Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life)
“
What happened?"
"Oil." The sheikh shook his head. "The great cursed wealth from beneath the ground that the Prophet foresaw would destroy us. And statehood-what a terrible idea that was, eh? This part of the world was never meant to function that way. Too many languages, too many tribes, too motivated by ideas those high-heeled cartographers from Paris couldn't understand. Don't understand. Will never understand. Well, God save them-they're not the ones who have to live in this mess. They said a modern state needs a single leader, a secular leader, and the emir was the closest thing we had. So to the emir went all the power. And anyone who thinks that isn't a good idea is hounded down and tossed in jail, as you have so recently discovered. All so that some pantywaist royal nephew can have a seat at the UN and carry a flag in the Olympics and be thoroughly ignored.
”
”
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
“
Imagine if you will—and you will—a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers—human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you’ve ever done quickly becomes all that you’ll ever do.
”
”
Michael A. Ferro (TITLE 13: A Novel)
“
Finn stood by the counter, having just finished making his thirteenth cup of coffee of the day. As always, the chicory fumes warmed me from the inside out and made me think of his father. I wished that the old man were here tonight. Fletcher would have known exactly what to do about the mess we were in—the mess I’d dragged us all into by declaring war on Mab in the first place. Finn stared at me with his green eyes. “Any chance of getting something sweet to go with my coffee?” he asked in a hopeful voice. I arched an eyebrow at him. “You mean all those pieces of strawberry pie that you ate for lunch weren’t enough?” “I’m a growing boy,” Finn said in a sincere tone. “I need my vitamins.” Bria snorted. “The only thing that’s growing on you, Lane, is your ego.” Finn sidled up to my sister and gave her a dazzling smile. “Well, other things of mine also tend to swell up in your presence, detective.” I rolled my eyes at Finn’s attempt at witty banter. Jo-Jo just chuckled, amused by his antics. Bria returned Finn’s smile with a syrupy sweet one of her own. “Oh, really? So it’s gone from what, pencil eraser to cocktail sausage by now?” Finn sputtered and almost spit out a mouthful of coffee. His face flushed, and he glared at Bria.
”
”
Jennifer Estep (Spider's Revenge (Elemental Assassin, #5))
“
What did I want? I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
”
”
Robert A. Heinlein (Glory Road)
“
If it’s love, those tears are a sign of distress, not an act of defiance. If it’s love, her bold fashion statement is something to be celebrated, not criticized. If it’s love, his mistakes are evidence of trying and learning, not simply messes to clean up. If it’s love, her slow pace is a reflection of her “stop and smell the roses” approach to life, not a time waster. If it’s love, his early morning wake-ups are something he’ll outgrow, not a plot to exhaust us. If it’s love, her poor choice is a chance to respond thoughtfully, not give a knee-jerk reaction. If it’s love, our voice has a little more calm; our eyes have a little more perspective; our hands have a little more gentleness. We won’t always choose love. We are human, after all. But when we choose love over anger, hurry, condemnation, shame, and sarcasm, there is space for goodness to enter the conversation. When love speaks, we are all better heard. When love looks, we are all better seen. Let us look and speak love today. As much as we possibly can, let us allow goodness in. TODAY’S REMINDER In the busyness of life, it’s easy to fall into the habit of saying my loved one’s name as if it’s just a word or a way to get his or her attention. Before I address my loved one today, I will take a moment to remember the time, thought, and care that went into choosing the name of this precious person, and then I’ll say it with genuine love. This one simple action holds the power to bring love into the conversation.
”
”
Rachel Macy Stafford (Only Love Today: Reminders to Breathe More, Stress Less, and Choose Love)
“
Dear New Orleans, What a big, beautiful mess you are. A giant flashing yellow light—proceed with caution, but proceed. Not overly ambitious, you have a strong identity, and don’t look outside yourself for intrigue, evolution, or monikers of progress. Proud of who you are, you know your flavor, it’s your very own, and if people want to come taste it, you welcome them without solicitation. Your hours trickle by, Tuesdays and Saturdays more similar than anywhere else. Your seasons slide into one another. You’re the Big Easy…home of the shortest hangover on the planet, where a libation greets you on a Monday morning with the same smile as it did on Saturday night. Home of the front porch, not the back. This engineering feat provides so much of your sense of community and fellowship as you relax facing the street and your neighbors across it. Rather than retreating into the seclusion of the backyard, you engage with the goings-on of the world around you, on your front porch. Private properties hospitably trespass on each other and lend across borders where a 9:00 A.M. alarm clock is church bells, sirens, and a slow-moving eight-buck-an-hour carpenter nailing a windowpane two doors down. You don’t sweat details or misdemeanors, and since everybody’s getting away with something anyway, the rest just wanna be on the winning side. And if you can swing the swindle, good for you, because you love to gamble and rules are made to be broken, so don’t preach about them, abide. Peddlin worship and litigation, where else do the dead rest eye to eye with the livin? You’re a right-brain city. Don’t show up wearing your morals on your sleeve ’less you wanna get your arm burned. The humidity suppresses most reason so if you’re crossing a one-way street, it’s best to look both ways. Mother Nature rules, the natural law capital “Q” Queen reigns supreme, a science to the animals, an overbearing and inconsiderate bitch to us bipeds. But you forgive her, and quickly, cus you know any disdain with her wrath will reap more: bad luck, voodoo, karma. So you roll with it, meander rather, slowly forward, takin it all in stride, never sweating the details. Your art is in your overgrowth. Mother Nature wears the crown around here, her royalty rules, and unlike in England, she has both influence and power. You don’t use vacuum cleaners, no, you use brooms and rakes to manicure. Where it falls is where it lays, the swerve around the pothole, the duck beneath the branch, the poverty and the murder rate, all of it, just how it is and how it turned out. Like a gumbo, your medley’s in the mix. —June 7, 2013, New Orleans, La.
”
”
Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
“
I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, ignoring the bite of the frosty air on my bare skin. I launched myself in the direction of the door, fumbling around until I found it. I tried shaking the handle, jiggling it, still thinking, hoping, praying that this was some big birthday surprise, and that by the time I got back inside, there would be a plate of pancakes at the table and Dad would bring in the presents, and we could—we could—we could pretend like the night before had never happened, even with the evidence in the next room over.
The door was locked.
“I’m sorry!” I was screaming. Pounding my fists against it. “Mommy, I’m sorry! Please!”
Dad appeared a moment later, his stocky shape outlined by the light from inside of the house. I saw Mom’s bright-red face over his shoulder; he turned to wave her off and then reached over to flip on the overhead lights.
“Dad!” I said, throwing my arms around his waist. He let me keep them there, but all I got in return was a light pat on the back.
“You’re safe,” he told me, in his usual soft, rumbling voice.
“Dad—there’s something wrong with her,” I was babbling. The tears were burning my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to be bad! You have to fix her, okay? She’s…she’s…”
“I know, I believe you.”
At that, he carefully peeled my arms off his uniform and guided me down, so we were sitting on the step, facing Mom’s maroon sedan. He was fumbling in his pockets for something, listening to me as I told him everything that had happened since I walked into the kitchen. He pulled out a small pad of paper from his pocket.
“Daddy,” I tried again, but he cut me off, putting down an arm between us. I understood—no touching. I had seen him do something like this before, on Take Your Child to Work Day at the station. The way he spoke, the way he wouldn’t let me touch him—I had watched him treat another kid this way, only that one had a black eye and a broken nose. That kid had been a stranger.
Any hope I had felt bubbling up inside me burst into a thousand tiny pieces.
“Did your parents tell you that you’d been bad?” he asked when he could get a word in. “Did you leave your house because you were afraid they would hurt you?”
I pushed myself up off the ground. This is my house! I wanted to scream. You are my parents! My throat felt like it had closed up on itself.
“You can talk to me,” he said, very gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I just need your name, and then we can go down to the station and make some calls—”
I don’t know what part of what he was saying finally broke me, but before I could stop myself I had launched my fists against him, hitting him over and over, like that would drive some sense back into him. “I am your kid!” I screamed. “I’m Ruby!”
“You’ve got to calm down, Ruby,” he told me, catching my wrists. “It’ll be okay. I’ll call ahead to the station, and then we’ll go.”
“No!” I shrieked. “No!”
He pulled me off him again and stood, making his way to the door. My nails caught the back of his hand, and I heard him grunt in pain. He didn’t turn back around as he shut the door.
I stood alone in the garage, less than ten feet away from my blue bike. From the tent that we had used to camp in dozens of times, from the sled I’d almost broken my arm on. All around the garage and house were pieces of me, but Mom and Dad—they couldn’t put them together. They didn’t see the completed puzzle standing in front of them.
But eventually they must have seen the pictures of me in the living room, or gone up to my mess of the room.
“—that’s not my child!” I could hear my mom yelling through the walls. She was talking to Grams, she had to be. Grams would set her straight. “I have no child! She’s not mine—I already called them, don’t—stop it! I’m not crazy!
”
”
Alexandra Bracken (The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds, #1))
“
From birth to death and further on
As we were born and introduced into this world,
We had a gift hard to express by word
And somewhere in our continuous road,
It kind of lost it sense and turned.
There was that time we sure remember,
When everything was now and 'till forever
Children with no worries and no regrets,
The only goal was making a few friends.
But later on everything has changed,
By minds that had it all arranged
To bring the people into stress,
Into creating their own mess.
We have been slaved by our own mind,
Turned into something out of our kind
Slowly faded away from the present time,
Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime.
They made it clearly a fight of the ego,
A never ending war that won't just go
They made it a competitive game,
To seek selfish materialistic fame.
They turned us one against eachother,
Man against man, brother against brother
Dividing us by religion and skin color,
Making us fight to death over a dollar.
Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts,
Wasting our days by living in the past
Depressed and haunted by the memories,
And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams.
Some of us tried learning how to dance,
Step after step, giving our soul a new chance
Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds,
Thus being aware of our natural bounce.
Some tried expressing in their rhymes,
The voice of a generation which never dies
They reached eternity through poetry
Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy
Others have found their way through spirituality,
Becoming conscious of the human duality
Seeking the spiritual enlightenment,
Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting
Science, philosophy, religion,
Try to explain the human origin.
Maybe changes are yet to come,
And it shall be better for some
Death's for the spirit not an end,
But a relieving of the embodiment
So I believe that furthermore,
We'll understand the power of our soul
But leaving behind all we know,
And all that we might not yet know
It all resumes to that certain truth,
That we all seek to once conclude.
”
”
Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
“
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.
I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.
But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.
As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.
But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.
Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.
The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.
The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.
I mean, what does a child know about faith?
It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.
Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.
Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.
I was devastated.
I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.
‘Please, God, comfort me.’
Blow me down … He did.
My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)
To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.
This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.
The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.
This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.
Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.
I had found a calling for my life.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is--that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.
Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.
In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power--until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is--art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ)
“
...a final word to "the children": do you want to get suckered like your big brothers and sisters? Those saps who spent 2008 standing behind the Obamessiah swaying and chanting, "We are the dawning of the Hopeychange" like brainwashed cult extras? Sooner or later you guys have to crawl out from under the social engineering and rediscover the contrarian spirit for which youth was once known...This will be the great battle of the next generation--to reclaim your birthright from those who spent it. If you don't, the entire global order will teeter and fall. But, if you do, you will have won a great victory. Every time a politician proposes new spending, tell him he's already spent your money, get his hand out of your pocket. Every time a politician says you can stay a child until your twenty-seventh birthday, tell him, "No, you're the big baby, not me--you've spent irresponsibly, and me and my pals are the ones who are gonna have to be the adults and clean up your mess. Don't treat met like a kid when your immaturity got us into this hole." This is a battle for the American idea, and it's an epic one, but--to reprise the lamest of lame-o-lines--you can do anything you want to do. So do it.
”
”
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
“
December 8, 1986
Hello John:
Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right.
They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?
Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”
They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.
Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:
“I put in 35 years…”
“It ain’t right…”
“I don’t know what to do…”
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.
I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”
One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.
So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.
To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Your boy,
Hank
”
”
Charles Bukowski
“
I didn’t know much about God, ’cept that if you pissed Him off, He’d getcha one day. My momma knew God—she was raised a Methodist. In fact, her daddy was a Methodist preacher. Still, Momma said she wanted more from God, so for the past couple of years she’d been searching for more. I got to go with her on some of those searches. First, we tried the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were cool, till I learned they didn’t celebrate Christmas. God or no God, I wasn’t giving up Christmas! Then we tried the Muslims (or the “Black Muslims,” as Momma called them). I didn’t like them because when we got to their church (which they called a mosque), they made us change our clothes and put on some of their clothes: floor-length dresses and material to wrap our heads in so our hair wouldn’t show. And they searched us too, which pissed me off. But Momma seemed to understand; she said it was because white folks thought the Muslims were militant, so white folks was always messing with ’em—you know, harassing them, arresting them, threatening them. Momma said the Muslims had to be careful so that’s why they were searching folks. uring Momma’s God search, we tried a few other religions. I never really did care one way or the other. I never really seriously thought about God because, no matter what the religion, they all wanted you to be perfect. And I knew I was far from perfect. So I figured God wouldn’t wanna mess with me. I don’t know which religion Momma finally decided on. Maybe she realized she didn’t need a particular religion to know and love God or for God to know and love her. Whatever she decided, she also decided that she wasn’t going to choose for me. She wanted to wait until I was old enough and then let me decide my religion.
”
”
Cupcake Brown (A Piece of Cake)
“
When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.
”
”
Robert Bly (Iron John: A Book about Men)
“
Others may not notice it, because an angry Toraf is truly a rare thing to behold, but Galen can practically feel the animosity emanating from his friend. Which is why he casually bumps into him, taking care to be overly apologetic.
“Oh, sorry about that, minnow. I didn’t even see you there.” Galen mimics Toraf’s demeanor, crossing his arms and staring ahead of them. What they’re supposed to be staring at, he’s not sure.
His effort is rewarded with a slight upward curve of his friend’s mouth. “Oh, don’t think twice about it, tadpole. I know it must be difficult to swim straight with a whale’s tail.”
Galen scowls, taking care not to glance down at his fin. Ever since they went to retrieve Grom, he’s been sore all below the waist, but he’d just attributed it to tension from finding Nalia, and then the whole tribunal mess-not to mention, hovering in place for hours at a time. Still, he did examine his fin the evening before, hoping to massage out any knots he found, but was a bit shocked to see that his fin span seemed to have widened. He decided that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. Now he’s not so sure. “What do you mean?” he says lightly.
Toraf nods down toward the sand. “You know what I mean. Looks like you have the red fever.”
“The red fever bloats you all over, idiot. Right before it kills you. It doesn’t make your fin grow wider. Besides, the red tide hasn’t been bad for years now.” But Toraf already knows what the red fever looks like. Not long after he first became a Tracker, Toraf was commissioned to find an older Syrena who had gone off on his own to die after he’d been caught in what the humans call the red tide. Toraf was forced to tie seaweed around the old one’s fin and pull his body to the Cave of Memories.
No, he doesn’t think I have the red fever.
Toraf allows himself a long look at Galen’s fin. If it were anyone else, Galen would consider it rude. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s sore.”
“Have you asked anyone about it?”
“I’ve had other things on my mind.” Which is the truth. Galen really hadn’t given it much thought until right now. Now that it has been noticed by someone else.
Toraf pulls his own fin around and after a few seconds of twisting and bending, he’s able to measure it against his torso. It spans from his neck to where his waist turns into velvety tail. He nods to Galen to do the same. Galen is horrified to find that his fin now spans from the top of his head to well below his waist. It really does look like a whale tail.
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” Toraf says, thoughtful. “I’ve gotten used to having the most impressive fin out of the two of us.”
Galen grins, letting his tail fall. “For a minute there I thought you really cared.”
Toraf shrugs. “Being self-conscious doesn’t suit you.”
Galen follows his gaze back out into the sea ahead of them. “So what do you think about yesterday’s tribunal?”
“I think I know where Nalia and Emma get their temper.”
Galen laughs. “I thought Jagen was going to pass out when Antonis grabbed him.”
“He’s not very good at interacting with others anymore, is he?”
“I wonder if he ever was. I told you how crazy Nalia always acted. Could be a family trait.”
It looks like Toraf might actually smile but instead his gaze jerks back out to sea, a new scowl on his face.
“Oh, no,” Galen groans. “What is it?” Please don’t say Emma. Please don’t say Emma.
“Rayna,” Toraf says through clenched teeth. “She’s heading straight for us.”
That’s almost as bad.
”
”
Anna Banks (Of Triton (The Syrena Legacy, #2))
“
Then we’re kissing right there in front of everyone. And nothing else seems to matter. Certainly not etiquette, or what anyone else thinks. It’s only his lips on mine, the pressure gentle. It’s only us. And I can’t stop—
Which is when Derrick arrives out of thin air and careens into my shoulder in a mess of wings and limbs. “Hellooooo! Don’t mind me, I’m just interrupting your brazen cuddle to steal the lady for a few minutes.”
Oh, damnation, not now. I’m really regretting not giving Derrick that extra five minutes. “Derrick,” I say through clenched teeth. I step back from Kiaran and try to control the pixie’s wriggling body in my hair. “Not—”
“My god.” Derrick collapses on my shoulder. “I am full of pie. I can barely even move my wings. I—” He squints over at Kiaran and smiles in delight. “Oh, hulloooooo, villainous wastrel!”
Kiaran is clearly not impressed. “You’ve a bit of pastry on your jacket.”
Derrick swipes at the morsel, snatches it, and eats it. “Was just saving a wee snack for later.” He giggles.
For god’s sake.
I look pleadingly at Kiaran. “Just . . . save that thought. Don’t go anywhere.” I’d like to resume the kissing. “I’ll be right back—”
“Kiaraaaaaaaaaan.” Derrick giggles. “Or would you prefer I keep villainous wastrel? I never asked.”
Kiaran arches an eyebrow. “I suppose that depends. Would you prefer pain in my arse?”
Derrick bursts into laughter. “Arse! Aileana. He said arse.”
“Hell,” I mutter. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”
I don’t wait for Kiaran’s response. I take Derrick with me to the lift and don’t say anything until I reach the fourth floor. “Let me just say, if someone gave you honey, I’ll—”
“No, no, no,” Derrick says, gliding off my shoulder. He now looks suspiciously lucid. “You said to save you after twenty-five minutes. So I did.”
“I said to save me if I was around Daniel and in obvious distress.” Not when I’m kissing someone in obvious delight.
“Firstly, I was the one in distress watching you kiss Kiaran because ughhhh.” Derrick wags a finger at me. “And secondly, you never said anything about distress, you said—”
“Forget what I said.” I narrow my eyes. “Are you telling me that down there was all an act?”
He grins. “I would have been perfect in the theater, wouldn’t you say?”
“Good heavens,” I murmur. At least I don’t have to deal with a drunk pixie. “Let’s just check the wards, all right
”
”
Elizabeth May (The Vanishing Throne (The Falconer, #2))
“
I said, "I want to wear something funny and cool. Marjorie, could I wear your sparkly baseball hat?"
The three of us looked at Marjorie.
Now I remember thinking that her answer could change everything back to the way it was; Dad could find a job and stop praying all the time and Mom could be happy and call Marjorie shellfish again and show us funny videos she found on YouTube, and we all could eat more than just spaghetti at dinner and, most important, Marjorie could be normal again. Everything would be okay if Marjorie would only say yes to me wearing the sparkly sequined baseball hat, the one she'd made in art class a few years ago.
The longer we watched Marjorie and waited for her response, the more the temperature in the room dropped and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
She stopped twisting her spaghetti around her fingers. She opened her mouth, and vomit slowly oozed out onto her spaghetti plate.
Dad: "Jesus!"
Mom: "Honey, are you okay?" She jumped out of her seat and went over to Marjorie, stood behind her, and held her hair up.
Marjorie didn't react to either parent, and she didn't make any sounds. She wasn't retching or convulsing involuntarily like one normally does when throwing up. It just poured out of her as though her mouth was an opened faucet. The vomit was as green as spring grass, and the masticated pasta looked weirdly dry, with a consistency of mashed-up dog food.
She watched Dad the whole time as the vomit filled her plate, some of it slopping over the edges and onto the table. When she finished she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "No, Merry. You can't wear my hat." She didn't sound like herself. Her voice was lower, adult, and growly. "You might get something on it. I don't want you to mess it up." She laughed.
Dad: "Marjorie..."
Marjorie coughed and vomited more onto her too-full plate. "You can't wear the hat because you're going to die someday." She found a new voice, this one treacly baby-talk. "I don't want dead things wearing my very special hat.
”
”
Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts)
“
After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully.
Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine.
Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path?
If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.
”
”
Martin Prechtel (The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)
“
When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen.
We Arabs never occupied any country.
Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country.
It is our countries that are occupied.
Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands...
It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations.
By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us.
If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice.
This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems.
We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules.
One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say...
This is not clear, and it causes confusion.
80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians.
The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian.
This is a mess.
Iran cannot be avoided.
Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies.
What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis?
Let our American friends answer this question:
Why Iraq? What is the reason?
Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not.
Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not.
were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not.
Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not.
Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America.
Should all these countries be destroyed?
Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs.
Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing.
Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein?
How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less!
I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him.
We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here.
We share nothing, beyond this hall.
Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein?
An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why?
Any one of you might be next. Yes.
America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini.
He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein.
Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein.
Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him.
You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us.
Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report.
He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program.
The Arabs have this right.
They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other...
But Allah prevails...
But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program?
We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say.
We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another.
Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy.
We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.
”
”
Muammar Gaddafi
“
Okay,” I finally said. “Can we all agree that this is maybe the most screwed-up situation we’ve ever found ourselves in?”
“Agreed,” they said in unison.
“Awesome.” I gave a little nod. “And do either of you have any idea what we should do about it?”
“Well, we can’t use magic,” Archer said.
“And if we try to leave, we get eaten by Monster Fog,” Jenna added.
“Right. So no plans at all, then?”
Jenna frowned. “Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?”
“Yeah, I was thinking about taking one of those showers where you huddle in the corner fully clothed and cry,” Archer offered.
I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “Great. So we’ll all go have our mental breakdowns, and then we’ll somehow get ourselves out of this mess.”
“I think our best bet is to lie low for a while,” Archer said. “Let Mrs. Casnoff think we’re all too shocked and awed to do anything. Maybe this assembly tonight will give us some answers.”
“Answers,” I practically sighed. “About freaking time.”
Jenna gave me a funny look. “Soph, are you…grinning?”
I could feel my cheeks aching, so I knew that I was. “Look, you two have to admit: if we want to figure out just what the Casnoffs are plotting, this is pretty much the perfect place.”
“My girl has a point,” Archer said, smiling at me. Now my cheeks didn’t just ache, they burned.
Clearing her throat, Jenna said, “Okay, so we all go up to our rooms, then after the assembly tonight we can regroup and decide what to do next.”
“Deal,” I said as Archer nodded.
“Are we all going to high-five now?” Jenna asked after a pause.
“No, but I can make up some kind of secret handshake if you want,” Archer said, and for a second, they smiled at each other.
But just as quickly, the smile disappeared from Jenna’s face, and she said to me, “Let’s go. I want to see if our room is as freakified as the rest of this place.”
“Good idea,” I said. Archer reached out and brushed his fingers over mine.
“See you later, then?” he asked. His voice was casual, but my skin was hot where he touched me.
“Definitely,” I answered, figuring that even a girl who has to stop evil witches from taking over the world could make time for kissage in there somewhere.
He turned and walked away. As I watched him go, I could feel Jenna starting at me. “Fine,” she acknowledged with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “He’s a little dreamy.”
I elbowed her gently in the side. “Thanks.”
Jenna started to walk to the stairs. “You coming?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be right up. I just want to take a quick look around down here.”
“Why, so you can be even more depressed?”
Actually, I wanted to stay downstairs just a little longer to see if anyone else showed up. So far, I’d seen nearly everyone I remembered from last year at Hex Hall. Had Cal been dragged here, too? Technically he hadn’t been a student, but Mrs. Casnoff had used his powers a lot last year. Would she still want him here?
To Jenna, I just said, “Yeah, you know me. I like poking bruises.”
“Okay. Get your Nancy Drew on.
”
”
Rachel Hawkins (Spell Bound (Hex Hall, #3))
“
In the Middle Ages, marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God, and God also authorised the father to marry his children according to his wishes and interests. An extramarital affair was accordingly a brazen rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love, and it is their inner feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by your spouse of twenty years, and if your new lover is kind, passionate and sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it?
But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the other concerned parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is never discovered, hiding it involves a lot of tension, and may lead to growing feelings of alienation and resentment.
The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when the same action causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? How do we weigh the feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of their spouses and children?
It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides deploy. Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter what their position is, they tend to justify it in the name of human feelings rather than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather, murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not because some ancient text says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Rather, theft is wrong because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong about it. If the same ancient text says that God commanded us not to make any images of either humans or animals (Exodus 20:4), but I enjoy sculpting such figures, and I don’t harm anyone in the process – then what could possibly be wrong with it?
The same logic dominates current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their happiness would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men love one another, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship.
After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)
”
”
Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate)
“
How did you find me?"
"I've followed you for a long time." He must have mistaken the look on my face for alarm or fear, and said, "Not literally. I just mean I never lost track."
But it wasn't fear, or anything like that. It was an instant of realization I'd have a lot in the coming days: I'd been thinking of him as coming back from the dead, but the fact was he'd been there all along. He'd been alive when I cried in my room over him being gone. He'd been alive when I started a new school without him, the day I made my first friend a Jones Hall, the time I ran into Ethan at the library. Cameron Quick and I had existed simultaneously on the planet during all of those moments. It didn't seem possible that we could have been leading separate lives, not after everything we'd been through together.
"...then I looked you up online," he was saying, "and found your mom's wedding announcement from before you changed your name. I didn't even need to do that. It's easy to find someone you never lost."
I struggled to understand what he was saying. "You mean...you could have written to me, or seen me, sooner?"
"I wanted to. Almost did, a bunch of times."
"Why didn't you? I wish you had." And I did, I wished it so much, imagined how it would have been to know all those years that he was there, thinking of me.
"Things seemed different for you," he said, matter-of-fact. "Better. I could tell that from the bits of information I found...like an interview with the parents who were putting their kids in your school when it first started. Or an article about that essay contest you won a couple years ago."
"You knew about that?"
He nodded. "That one had a picture. I could see just from looking at you that you had a good thing going. Didn't need me coming along and messing it up."
"Don't say that," I said quickly. Then: "You were never part of what I wanted to forget."
"Nice of you to say, but I know it's not true."
I knew what he was thinking, could see that he'd been carrying around the same burden all those years as me.
"You didn't do anything wrong." It was getting cold on the porch, and late, and the looming topic scared me. I got up. "Let's go in. I can make coffee or hot chocolate or something?"
"I have to go."
"No! Already?" I didn't want to let him out of my sight.
"Don't worry," he said. "Just have to go to work. I'll be around."
"Give me your number. I'll call you."
"I don't have a phone right now."
"Find me at school," I said, "or anytime. Eat lunch with us tomorrow." He didn't answer. "Really," I continued, "you should meet my friends and stuff."
"You have a boyfriend," he finally said. "I saw you guys holding hands."
I nodded. "Ethan."
"For how long?"
"Three months, almost." I couldn't picture Cameron Quick dating anyone, though he must have at some point. If I'd found Ethan, I was sure Cameron had some Ashley or Becca or Caitlin along the way. I didn't ask. "He's nice," I added. "He's..." I don't know what I'd planned to say, but whatever it was it seemed insignificant so I finished that sentence with a shrug.
"You lost your lisp."
And about twenty-five pounds, I thought. "I guess speech therapy worked for both of us."
He smiled. "I always liked that, you know. Your lisp. It was...you." He started down the porch steps. "See you tomorrow, okay?"
"Yeah," I said, unable to take my eyes off of him. "Tomorrow.
”
”
Sara Zarr (Sweethearts)