Postcard Perfect Quotes

I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something more specific in mind for them. I am waiting for the exact perfect situation and then BOOM! I'll explode in a light show of feeling and emotion - a pinata stuffed with tender nuances and pent-up passions

What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me by the Trocadero in Paris. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier.

Packy watched her walk away, her perfect heart-shaped rear end testing the confines of her tight black dress. There was a God. Packy was now certain of it. How else could such heart-stopping beauty be accounted for? Such a thing could not be the product of a random universe. A flower, maybe. A rainbow, perhaps. But not Venus Versailles.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway's edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children's early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges--all that was and still is available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie.

If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards--

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

Hawaii is still the single most frequent fantasy destination, not because of political stability or conveniences, but because Hawaii seduces the imagination. It's the perfect postcard, no props, no fillers.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

I told him about the Oedipal thing, about my father leaving when I was very young so I knew how to pine for men, but not how to love them. So he said, 'You'd probably would have been perfect for somebody in World War Two. You'd meet him and then he would get shipped overseas.' And I said, 'Maybe on our date I could drop you off and you could enlist,' and he said he would just got out and rent a uniform. So he was very funny.

And in short measures life may perfect be

There are times in life when you discover a small, perfect thing. It doesn't happen often, but when it does you have to savor it. This book is a small, perfect thing." -Caleb

One might say that, until now, the social, cultural, and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place. I first became aware of this problem several years ago, when walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what was then newly democratic Prague. There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were on display, along with bargain jewelry and 'Prague' key chains. Among the bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms. The sight struck me as odd. Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.

Glenskehy is outside Dublin, tucked away in the Wicklow mountains near nothing very much. I'd lived half my life in Wicklow without getting any closer to it than the odd signpost. It turned out to be that kind of place: a scatter of houses getting old around a once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford. Eight o'clock on a Thursday morning, and the main street - to use both words loosely - was postcard-perfect and empty, just one old woman pulling a shopping trolley past a worn granite monument to something or other, little sugared-almond houses lined up crookedly behind her, and the hills rising green and brown and indifferent over it all. I could imagine someone getting killed there, but a farmer in a generations-old fight over a boundary fence, a woman whose man had turned savage with drink and cabin fever, a man sharing a house with his brother forty years too long: deep-rooted, familiar crimes old as Ireland, nothing to make a detective as experienced as Sam sound like that.

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

river rippling behind the tree line, and the rich purples and deep oranges of the random wildflowers that had sprouted up all around, were absolutely stunning. To her, being in Hope Falls felt like she had been transported into a Thomas Kincaid painting. The entire town was postcard perfect. She didn’t miss the fact that she was one lucky girl getting to spend a significant amount of time here. That luck, however, was not translating to her house-hunting efforts. In fact, the apartment above Sue Ann’s Café was looking more and more appealing. After seeing six properties, Lily had come to the conclusion that settling was most likely her only option. Four out of the six properties Lauren had shown her had had everything that Lily needed. Space, hardwood floors, updated appliances. But they also all had one thing in common—they were totally secluded. She had been nervous just being at the properties and she’d been with Lauren the entire time. She couldn’t imagine what she would have felt like being out there alone. Which, logically, Lily knew was a completely ridiculous reaction. Whether or not there is a neighbor for a mile should have no relevance in Lily’s house hunt. But…it did. Maybe next year it wouldn’t, Lily thought to herself, trying to put a positive spin on her neurosis. “Okay, I think this one might be the one,” Lauren said confidently. Lily felt the car coming to a stop, and she looked up, squinting in the sun, to see a quaint cottage-style house.

I talked to my agent today. He thinks maybe I should do a television series. I would like to do something where I have to work all the time. Keep my mind off my mind, as it were. Get up real early in the morning, act like someone else all day, and fall asleep at night. A perfect job for me. The fix that doesn’t.

I was raised in the desert and always appreciated the way its landscape gives you a chance to see what's coming. In Florida, dangers don't reveal themselves until it's too late. The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.

There is no better recipe for popularity than a postcard-perfect campus on the outskirts of Boston. That formula keeps Wellesley at the top of the women’s college pecking order—along with superb programs in economics and the natural sciences. Nearly a quarter of the students are Asian American, the highest proportion in the East. (The Elite Liberal Arts Colleges - Wellesley College)

Roses in particular have undergone so many changes that they have often lost their scent. They have become floral postcards, odorless invalids—visually perfect, but with none of the old emotion.

And the water—it was otherworldly. A hue of teal so postcard perfect, I was disbelieving. But it was not the only shade of blue. When the sky was overcast or the sun had not yet punctured the surface of the morning, we saw lavender gray and cornflower ripple across the ocean’s calm surface. Under the high sun, we boarded fishing boats and walked beaches, witnessing coastal cerulean, jungle azure, deep pools of peacock and sapphire. We swam in turquoise, indigo, aquamarine.

For example, instead of saying that it was a rainy night, you can say, “At night she could see from her window that the postcard-perfect sky from an hour ago had turned to a dark abyss filled with tar-black clouds that had just begun to weep heavily, as though completely devoid of any hope in the humankind beneath.

we both sit quietly for a moment, imagining how flawed a perfect life really is.

It’s a picture-perfect postcard picture; it looked, I thought, growing up, exactly like one of those posters you affix to the back of fish tanks. That’s not exactly the truth. I used to think that every fish tank’s backdrop actually was a photograph of these specific mountains. That other mountains existed didn’t dawn on me until embarrassingly late in the game.

What makes the perfect mother? This is something that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. I’m certain all mothers do, as they try to process the crushing guilt they feel for the mistakes they believe they have made.

According to one of those peculiar theories, forensic evidence accumulated over the centuries proved that, after millennia of supposed evolution, humans had managed to eliminate a bit of body hair, perfect their loincloths, and refine their tools, but little else. From this premise, a second part of the theorem was inexplicably arrived at, and it went something like this: what the said threadbare evolution had not achieved even remotely was to understand that the more one tries to hide something from a child, the more he is set on finding it, be it a sweet or a postcard with outrageous chorus girls flaunting their charms to the wind. 'And thank goodness that's the way things are, because the day we lose the spark that makes us want to know things, and young people are content with the nonsense dressed in tinsel sold to them by the current popes of bullshittery—be it a mechanical electrical appliance or a battery-run chamber pot—and become incapable of understanding anything that lies beyond their backsides, we'll return to the age of the slug.

I spend a lot of time gazing out the window to the green hills lined with vineyards and dotted with houses. There’s not much to this quaint valley snuggled along the coast, but it’s the most magical place I’ve ever seen with its multicolored buildings, steep streets bordered with wooden fishing boats. It’s like the postcard you stare at for hours, wishing you’d been the one to take the picture just so you could experience such a perfect place. I’m living inside that postcard. I’m taking the pictures.

Should the perfect mother let her children make mistakes or sweep in to protect them against every false step? Does she twist the truth to make the world seem more palatable or be brutally honest from the outset? Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny . . . are these all legends that enrich childhood or lies that destroy trust?

I can tell right away by looking at you what you want to eat," he says. "I can tell how many brothers and sisters you have." After divining my favorite color (blue) and my astrological sign (Aquarius), Nakamura pulls out an ivory stalk of takenoko, fresh young bamboo ubiquitous in Japan during the spring. "This came in this morning from Kagumi. It's so sweet that you can eat it raw." He peels off the outer layer, cuts a thin slice, and passes it across the counter. First, he scores an inch-thick bamboo steak with a ferocious santoku blade. Then he sears it in a dry sauté pan until the flesh softens and the natural sugars form a dark crust on the surface. While the bamboo cooks, he places two sacks of shirako, cod milt, under the broiler. ("Milt," by the way, is a euphemism for sperm. Cod sperm is everywhere in Japan in the winter and early spring, and despite the challenges its name might create for some, it's one of the most delicious things you can eat.) Nakamura brings it all together on a Meiji-era ceramic plate: caramelized bamboo brushed with soy, broiled cod milt topped with miso made from foraged mountain vegetables, and, for good measure, two lightly boiled fava beans. An edible postcard of spring. I take a bite, drop my chopsticks, and look up to find Nakamura staring right at me. "See, I told you I know what you want to eat." The rest of the dinner unfolds in a similar fashion: a little counter banter, a little product display, then back to transform my tastes and his ingredients into a cohesive unit. The hits keep coming: a staggering plate of sashimi filled with charbroiled tuna, surgically scored squid, thick circles of scallop, and tiny white shrimp blanketed in sea urchin: a lesson in the power of perfect product. A sparkling crab dashi topped with yuzu flowers: a meditation on the power of restraint. Warm mochi infused with cherry blossoms and topped with a crispy plank of broiled eel: a seasonal invention so delicious it defies explanation.

That's why the sweetness of the sexual contact is perfect, but it can only be a dissappointment.

You know these girls wearing leggings that show off their legs and ass perfectly through their pants? I think the next step is for us guys to wear leggings too, with a part sticking out in the shape of a dick. Our dicks would fit into it and guys would be walking with perfect silhouettes of our dicks flopping around... Or we could be fully erect. Lots of options there! Because the next step after that is for girls to have a part of their leggings that go up into their vaginas! So we can walk up to them and literally fuck without taking off any clothing. By the way, the leggings will act as a condom too. But I doubt that idea will take off. We aren't actually a sex crazed country. Seriously, look at the stores around the average city. We have shops for nick-knacks like postcards, snow globes, lawn gnomes, and all around stupid shit. Then, when I walk past a girls clothing store and I see mannequin bodies of hot ass girls that show off some sexy clothing...