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Your level of neuroses will only find love in a made-for-TV movie.
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Michelle Hodkin (The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #1))
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Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicorn—unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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I wanted this to be a movie on TV so I could press the off button and make it all go away.
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Michelle Rowen (Dark Kiss (Nightwatchers, #1))
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Everyone gets killed in the shower. Don't you go to the movies? Psycho. Dead in shower. The MExican in No country for Old Men. Dead in shower. Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath. Almost dead in shower, or in the bath, anyway. But she did that thing with her toe and got out OD. Still the shower, though...Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. Dead in shower. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Very dead in shower. But never closets. I can't think of anyone shot in a closet. This is why I hide in closets.
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Derek B. Miller (Norwegian by Night (Sheldon Horowitz #2))
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I don't think he can hurt. Wizards and witches go hand in hand, after all. Didn't you read Harry Potter?"
Eden stared at him. "Well, yeah."
"I didn't read the books," he continued. "But I did get to see the movies. A previous host was a fan. He even wore dress robes and pretended he'd been sorted into a house. Hufflepuff, if you can believe it. Who liked Hufflepuff best? I mean, seriously.
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Michelle Rowen (That Old Black Magic (Living In Eden, #3))
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Over time our conversations became a lot like explaining a movie to someone who has walked in on the last thirty minutes.
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Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)
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The media-contamination hypothesis usually focuses on the book Michelle Remembers (Smith and Pazder, 1980) and the movie Rosemary's Baby;. These images were in the popular culture for centuries before survivor memories started to surface in therapy; therefore, the media-contamination hypothesis fails to account for the time lag and cannot provide a full account of the phenomenona.
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Colin A. Ross (Satanic Ritual Abuse: Principles of Treatment)
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Found in trees. Sometimes also in old silent movie theaters, seaside zoos, magic shops, hat shops, time-travel shops, topiary gardents, cowboy boots, castle turrets, comet museums, dog pounds, mermaid ponds, dragon lairs, library stacks (the ones in the back), piles of leaves, piles of pancakes, the belly of a fiddle, the bell of a flower, or in the company of wild herds of typewriters.
But mostly in trees.
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Michelle Cuevas (Confessions of an Imaginary Friend)
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So you get fancily dressed and sometimes professionally made up. A driver in a town car picks you up, which makes you feel weird and apologetic. An upbeat public relations person you don’t know leads you onto a red carpet where you’re shouted at to “look here!” and “here” at a hundred strangers with flashbulbs for faces. And then, after those brief moments of manufactured glamour, you find yourself in a regular old creaky movie theater seat, sipping Diet Coke from a sweaty plastic cup and salting your fingers with warm popcorn. Lights dim. Mandated enthusiasm begins.
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Michelle McNamara (I'll Be Gone in the Dark)
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We head for 680, which will take us seventeen miles south to the next attack, the third that month. October 1978. Carter was president. Grease had been the huge summer movie, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s “Summer Nights” was still a radio mainstay, though the Who’s “Who Are You” was climbing the charts. The fresh-scrubbed face of thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields stared blankly from the cover of Seventeen. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen bled to death from a stab wound on a bathroom floor at the Chelsea Hotel. John Paul II was the new pope. Three days before the San Ramon attack, the movie Halloween was released.
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Michelle McNamara (I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer)
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Our meals, the dishes we're creating, bring on new sensations---an awakening of sorts for certain people, albeit nostalgia or something else. Food brings on emotions---and we're doing things right if we're bringing them out in people."
"Food is about balance of flavors and textures and taste, not emotion."
Charles grips my shoulders. "Kate, when you cook, how are you doing it? With anger or with love?"
"Probably a little of both sometimes," I gasp. "What are you saying? People are eating my emotions? Like in that movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar? Simply Irresistible? She was a chef, like me, with a flailing restaurant, and there was a rich guy, like you. And a crab."
He snickers. "This is real life, not the movies. And I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
”
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Samantha Verant (The Spice Master at Bistro Exotique)
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We may think we know how the criminal justice system works. Television is overloaded with fictional dramas about police, crime, and prosecutors—shows such as Law & Order. These fictional dramas, like the evening news, tend to focus on individual stories of crime, victimization, and punishment, and the stories are typically told from the point of view of law enforcement. A charismatic police officer, investigator, or prosecutor struggles with his own demons while heroically trying to solve a horrible crime. He ultimately achieves a personal and moral victory by finding the bad guy and throwing him in jail. That is the made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system. It perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals and punishing them. These television shows, especially those that romanticize drug-law enforcement, are the modern-day equivalent of the old movies portraying happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal system of racialized oppression and control. Those
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Those who have been swept within the criminal justice system know that the way the system actually works bears little resemblance to what happens on television or in the movies. Full-blow trials of guilt or innocence rarely occur; many people never even meet with an attorney; witnesses are routinely paid and coerced by the government; police regularly stop and search people for no reason whatsoever; penalties for many crimes are so severe that innocent people plead guilty, accepting plea bargains to avoid harsh mandatory sentences; and children, even as young as fourteen, are sent to adult prisons. Rules of law and procedure, such as 'guilt beyond a reasonable doubt' or 'probable cause' or 'reasonable suspicion,' can easily be found in court cases and law-school textbooks but are much harder to find in real life.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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The building is quiet. Too damn quiet. The kind of quiet that always precedes the bad guy's unexpected, shit-your-pants moment of arrival in the movies.
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Michelle Bryan (Strain of Defiance (Strain of Resistance #2))
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Daniel and the Pelican
So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle.
Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out.
“Would you like a hand?”
I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod.
He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real.
The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.”
“I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered.
Oh my goodness.
“Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech.
“Yes, every now and then.”
In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary.
As I watched Daniel prepare for his passenger, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him from somewhere.
“Have we ever met before?” I asked.
“No I don’t think so,” was his reply, smiling again with warmth that would melt glaciers.
I held my breath as the man crept toward the pelican. Their eyes met, and the bird meekly allowed Daniel to drape a towel over his face and place him in the cage. There was no struggle, no flapping wings and not one peep of protest--just calm.
“Yes!” I shrieked with excitement when the door was latched. What had seemed a no-win situation was no longer hopeless. The pelican was finally safe.
Before they drove away, I thanked my fellow rescuer for his help.
“It was my pleasure, Michelle.”
And he was gone.
Wait a minute. How did he know my name? We didn’t introduce ourselves. I only knew his name because of his shirt.
Later when I called the Sanctuary to check on the pelican, I asked if I might speak with Daniel.
No one had ever heard of him.
”
”
Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul: Angels Among Us: 101 Inspirational Stories of Miracles, Faith, and Answered Prayers)
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When they weren't on the beach or sailing, Alicia and Jack were indoors, usually in the basement watching movies. Alicia missed so many important films during those frightening years.
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Michelle Gable (The Summer I Met Jack)
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When I sit to write out my 3 year vision I let my thoughts and words flow. This is a journal entry written by your future self. Let it play out like a movie you’re watching, with you as the star in the setting you most love.
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MichelleJacobik
“
the challenge with being given limited representation in the first place is that we mistake valid critique as a call for no representation (“So, you’d rather us not have this person/story/movie?”),
”
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Michelle MiJung Kim (The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change)
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Way to go, Ethan. Managing to irritate the movie star within a minute of meeting him.
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Michelle Madow (The Head of Medusa (Elementals, #3))
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After the movie The Forbidden Fruit had come out three years ago, the word about my past had got to my son.
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Nika Michelle (The Reunion: A Forbidden Fruit Story)
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There are the moments you know you’ll remember forever as soon they happen: your engagement, standing at the altar and saying “I do,” the news of your spouse cheating, someone saying the words “you’re fired.” All those beautiful and wretched pieces of news available on your personal movie reel at any second and until the end of time. Still,
”
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Michelle Gable (A Paris Apartment)
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Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you’re attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug.
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Michelle Tea (How to Grow Up)
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Not a Hallmark movie—a PassionFlix. I want the smut.
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Michelle Hercules (Play It Dirty (Players of Hannaford U, #1))
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I’ll work on it… Just not tonight,” Elijah said. I rolled my eyes at him and let Eli pinch his arm hairs the rest of the movie
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Michelle Gross (One Percent of You)
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although Michelle’s tastes and mine often diverged: She preferred rom-coms, while according to her, my favorite movies usually involved “terrible things happening to people, and then they die.
”
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land: The powerful political memoir from the former US President)
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Soon enough, I began connecting the dots. The constant talk about money, about best friends (Johnny and Mark are best friends, but Mark also tells Peter he’s his best friend; Michelle and Lisa are best friends; Johnny’s other best friends all show up for his party–the whole script was like an advisory warning about the perils of having friends at all),
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Greg Sestero (The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made)
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Content creators romanticize adolescent friendships the same way Hallmark movies treat love: there is a lid for every pot, a yin for every yang, and a savior for every screwup.
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Michelle Icard (Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School)
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I need to remind myself that every time I choose what is easy—checking a website instead of reading, eating leftover Halloween candy instead of reheating soup, putting a movie on for the kids instead of pursuing a common interest, sending Keith to the store so I don’t have to deal with it—I am denying myself an opportunity to stretch, to feel, to deepen.
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Michelle Damiani (Il Bel Centro: A Year in the Beautiful Center)
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We advertise good friendships as part of the Complete Teenage Experience, because good friendships make for great stories. Content creators romanticize adolescent friendships the same way Hallmark movies treat love: there is a lid for every pot, a yin for every yang, and a savior for every screwup. Turn on any Netflix original movie about teenagers or read any great YA book, and you will see that the perfect sidekick (funny! supportive! quirky! endlessly loyal!) is a fixture in each teen’s life. In reality, middle school friendships play out less like Netflix originals, and more like those toy commercials that came on during Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids. As an only child, I remember yearning to have the same fun those kids were having, begging my parents for the Barbie Jeep or Hot Wheels Track until they gave in. But soon after ripping the toy from its packaging, I came to the stark realization that it was nothing like advertised. Those kids were only pretending to have fun, the set designers made the toys seem infinitely cooler than they actually were, and more often than not, we didn’t even have the right-sized batteries. What a colossal disappointment! Especially when those kids on TV looked like they were having the time of their lives.
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Michelle Icard (Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School)
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Michelle’s tastes and mine often diverged: She preferred rom-coms, while according to her, my favorite movies usually involved “terrible things happening to people, and then they die.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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I’d always hoped my sixteenth birthday would be the moment I came into my witch powers. That was the way it worked in books and movies,
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Michelle Madow (The Faerie Games: The Complete Series (Dark World: The Faerie Games))
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Trevi Square was just like Julian had described—a bunch of restaurants surrounding a large fountain in the middle. The fountain was built to look like the Trevi Fountain in Rome—it was huge, with beautiful statues of gods and creatures from mythology around it. I recognized it from pictures and movies, although of course I’d never been to the real one myself.
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Michelle Madow (The Faerie Games: The Complete Series (Dark World: The Faerie Games))
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They had been to the late-night showing of that Queen movie. Yes, I know it’s already out on DVD, but Pete wanted to see it on the big screen, because of the whole Live Aid thing…’ ‘Kate! Get to the point!
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Michelle Morgan (The Webs We Weave)
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Absent-mindedly she stroked her belly, trying not to imagine that it already felt a little rounder.
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Michelle Duffy (Trapped in an 80s Teen Movie)
“
Those who have been swept within the criminal justice system know that the way the system actually works bears little resemblance to what happens on television or in movies. Full-blown trials of guilt or innocence rarely occur; many people never even meet with an attorney; witnesses are routinely paid and coerced by the government; police regularly stop and search people for no reason whatsoever; penalties for many crimes are so severe that innocent people plead guilty, accepting plea bargains to avoid harsh mandatory sentences; and children, even as young as fourteen, are sent to adult prisons. Rules of law and procedure, such as “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” or “probable cause” or “reasonable suspicion,” can easily be found in court cases and law-school textbooks but are much harder to find in real life.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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I could see she was crying. Part of me wanted to bound out of the car and back to her like something out of a romantic movie, but I knew it wouldn’t resolve anything. We just had to hope now, and wait. All I could do was know in my heart that she was happy I had come to her after all.
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Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)