Ritz Quotes

Gossip is like thread wound over a spindle of truth, changing its shape.

Which is the greater sin? To care too much? Or too little?

Buying loyalty can be as effective as fear when one’s rival is poorer than oneself.

Whither be the heart of Justice?             Lo, in stone, child. Lo, in stone.             Whither be the heart of Justice?             Lo, tis fast in stone.

Mead. O sweet elixir, Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.  

If one does not react to gossip, the informer hushes more quickly.

At what point does faith become insanity?

This world would be a pleasant place if people didn’t inhabit it.

The early women rise before I do. Their lamps splinter the gloom of the kitchens. They chatter in whispers as they brew tea for the cooks. Windows are open to counter the heat of the ovens. Outside, the sky is as black as my soul.

It does little good to regret a choice. So often people say, “If only I had known,” implying they would’ve acted differently in a given situation. It is true that desires of the moment can blind one’s sight of the future. Revenge is not as sweet as the adage claims. Yet who could pass a chance to taste it? And if the chance were allowed to slip by, would the fool regret his lack of action? 

This evening I spied her in the back orchard. I decided to sacrifice one of my better old shirts and carried it out to her. The weather’s been warm of late. Buds on the apple trees are ready to burst. Usually by this time of the year, at that time of day, the back orchard is full of screaming children. Damut’s boys were the only two. They were on the terrace below her, running through the slanted sunlight, chasing each other around tree trunks. She stood above them, like a merlin watching rabbits play.

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' 'How pleasant then to be insane!

I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward.  I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer. We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?” He, of course, replied, “No.” “Well, we’re going to a better place.” When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds. Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.” “Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked. “My father’s a ghost,” he whispered. I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined.  Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path. “Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

Baby, just ‘cuz you’re cute doesn’t mean I wasn’t bein’ serious about spankin’ your tight little ass for doin’ dumb shit, Ritz. You do it again, and you’re gonna get it.

Tea at the Ritz is the last delicious morsel of Edwardian London. The light is kind, the cakes are frivolous and the tempo is calm, confident and leisurely.

One might even argue that if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in a zoo, since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of parasites and enemies and the abundance of food in the first, and their respective abundance and scarcity in the second. Think about it yourself. Would you rather be put up at the Ritz with free room service and unlimited access to a doctor or be homeless without a soul to care for you?... But I don't insist. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

A hotdog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz

Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment.  The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become. As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper.  She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale. Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?” I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.  “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”             I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”  I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank. “Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”   I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”   So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.

Knew the moment I saw you, standin’ outside the shop, scared, that you were an innocent little thing. So sweet. So good.” He lowered his head to take my chin between his teeth. “You got no idea what it’s like for you to give me your trust, Ritz. If I was a good man I’d tell you to find somebody better, somebody that won’t lose their shit over an asshole eye fuckin’ you.” His tongue traced the oval shape of my chin. “But I’m not a good man, and I’m gonna take everythin’ you want to give me and everythin’ you don’t.

Truth, justice...I always thought they were absolutes, like God. And Mom. And apple pie. But you could make apple pie from Ritz crackers. You could make cakes without sugar. We learned how to fake things, during the war.

Under the stars,' she repeated. 'I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.' It was a dream,' said John quietly. 'Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' How pleasant then to be insane!' So I'm told,' said John gloomily. 'I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.

The more I lived with Jan, the more I loved her, the more I made her miserable. It was a vicious cycle (page 209)……The more I loved her the more I hated her. And the more she loved me, the more I harmed myself (page 269).

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.

Everything is better when it shits on a ritz.

HOW HAD FOSTER NEVER TOLD HIM THERE WERE HUMAN SNACKS CALLED RITZ CRACKERS?! Sure, they were even drier and crumblier than those horrible digestive biscuit things. BUT. Fitz Vacker! Ritz cracker!

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

Like why Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?

This wasn’t a romantic getaway at the Ritz, unless running for your lives counted as foreplay.

she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

The last days before graduation are bad enough, God knows--out of the womb you go, ready or not. The halls rang with the laughter of the girls who were going to be brides in the next week (and widows shortly after)...

His moods changed minute to minute, and Jan could change him quicker than anyone. The more he loved her the more mixed up he got. He was such a beautiful man, but so unstable.

They are in danger of becoming immune to the horrors surrounding them. This is what an occupation does—it wears you down until you accept evil. Until you can no longer fully define it, even. Let alone recognize it.

People do that, of course—they come into your life, illuminate some dark corner you’d not even known was there, then they disappear. True connection is rare, but that’s just the way it is.

Marriage is not defined by what we hope to gain, but by what we are willing to sacrifice.

I looked all over the city for you, Ritz. You think I'd do that for anybody else?

You know there’s nothin’ and nobody you gotta worry about, Ritz.

Dorms?" Amy heard Natalie call from behind her. "You're joking, right?" "Don't worry," Hamilton said as he raced ahead, carrying both his and Natalie's suitcases. "Madison doesn't sleepwalk anymore." "Bring that back!" Natalie shouted as she ran after him. "I'm going to stay at the Ritz-Carlton!" "Is that where they make the crackers?" Madison asked. "I'm coming, too!

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

He bit down again before nuzzling the line of my jaw. "You're mine." His lower body pressed into my stomach. Hard, he was so hard. "Your mouth, your face, your ass, your pussy, Ritz. You're all mine.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future - flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

It is devastating to see a loved one suffer; it is harder to bear than your own pain. Love is despair, love is delight. Love is fear, love is hope. Love is mercy. Love is anger.

It was Frankie Lymon all over again," Marvin said. "Only this kid had mastered James Brown's moves. Michael was like Stevie. From the very beginning, he worried me.

Perhaps he simply needs to mark their existence by noting their absence.

Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight. You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive—like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach—there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift, as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite. Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks.

Money itself isn’t evil, but the love of it is the root of all kinds of evil. So these things helped me to stay grounded. I began realizing that people on yachts weren’t happier than people in rowboats. Bentleys break down just like Nissans. You can get a great night’s sleep at a Hampton Inn just like at a Ritz-Carlton. And flying in first class won’t get you to your destination any faster than riding in coach.

Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.

He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud.

I've asked around and haven't found a B.A. yet who doesn't still have nightmares (and I don't speak figuratively) about not being able to find the room where the exam is to be given or about realizing at the last moment that he has not once attended the course.

I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.

Normally I'd have given up by now, but he was so cute I decided that he was entitled to be difficult. I mean, I may get distracted sometimes, but I always saved a special space at the back of my mind for Sean, like the Presidential Suit at Ritz Carlton. Throughout the first two years of high school, I let him stay there in peace, undisturbed by my meaningless flings which came and went in the hotel lobby.

Loaded my black patent leather bag with sherry, cream cheese (for grammy’s apricot tarts), thyme, basil, bay leaves (for Wendy’s exotic stews—a facsimile of which now simmers on the stove), golden wafers (such an elegant name for Ritz crackers), apples and green pears. I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing—I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne--but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they'd bought it for.

My good sir,' he said, 'do you know to whom you are speaking? I am the Prince of Bengal and these are my friends, the Princess of Kowloon and the Duke of Massachusettes. We are waiting for my father, the Maharajah, to come out of this bookshop so he can take us to the Ritz for tea. Do you intend to prevent us from going about our business?

A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained on hundred thousand dollars.

But you can’t very well lug an encyclopedia around hotels. Fortunately, I did have my flask.

There had never been anyone at all to whom she came first.

It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an epoque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.

Besides, she likes Judy Garland and knows that if she sings a Judy Garland song, she’s gonna sing it better than Judy ever could. That gives Aretha great satisfaction.

love must be sweeter, when death is so close you can touch it.

Jacob would have rather looked out of place at the Ritz than look like he cared to fit in anywhere.

We drove in to Biarritz and left the car outside a very Ritz place.

People like to be served, but invisibly. —César Ritz

All I’m saying is if you’re gonna have a cracker for a daddy, might as well be a Ritz cracker, right?” Levi

Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training

Will father be there?" she asked. John turned to her in astonishment. Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago." After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night. What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc_! Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth." It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." How pleasant then to be insane!" So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours." So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.

Little bits were one of Dorey Jewett's gems: small, sweet lobster knuckles that were sautéed in butter. There were no herbs involved, just enough of a Ritz-cracker coating to absorb the butter for ease of eating.

A ripe suggestion," I said. "Where are you meeting her? At the Ritz?" "Near the Ritz." He was geographically accurate. About fifty yards east of the Ritz there is one of those blighted tea-and-bun shops you see dotted about all over London and into this, if you'll believe me, young Bingo dived like a homing rabbit; and before I had time to say a word we were wedged in at a table, on the brink of a silent pool of coffee left there by an early luncher.

It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it's what I was made to do.

My rib cage clenched all of the organs and muscles within it. It pulsed, full of life and warmth and gummy bears and glitter. This was... I don't know how to explain it—it was like Christmas morning when you were a kid. It was everything I’d wanted. Each of his thumbs curved over the shells of my ears. "That's my girl." His girl. After all the crap that I'd gone through today, there couldn't have been three better words to hear. Well, there were three other words I'd like to hear but I'd take these from him. That didn't mean that he was the only one who knew how to give. He'd given enough. My bones and heart knew that there was nothing for me to fear. I loved him and sometimes there were consequences of it that were scary, but it—the emotion itself—wasn't. I knew that now. What kind of life was I living if I let my fears steer me? This was a gift I’d forgotten to appreciate lately. For so long I’d been happy to just be alive but now...now I had Dex. I had my entire life ahead of me, and I needed to quit being a wuss and grab life by the balls. In this case, I’d take his nipple piercings. “What’cha thinkin’, Ritz?” I held my hands out for him to see how badly they were shaking. “I’m thinking that I love you so much it scares me. See?” Dex's thumbs tipped my chin back so that I could look at his face—at his beautiful, scruffy face. "Baby." He said my name like a purr that reached the vertebrae of my spine. "And even though it really scares the living crap out of me, I love you, and I want you to know that. Everything you've done for me..." Oh hell. I had to let out a long gust of breath. "Thank you. You're the best thing that ever yelled at me." He murmured my name again, low and smooth. The pads of his thumbs dug a little deeper into the soft tissue on the underside of my jaw. "If all the shit I do for you, and all the shit I'd be willin' to do for you doesn't tell you how deep you've snuck into me, honey, then I'll tell you." He lowered his mouth right next to my ear, his teeth nipping at my lobe before he whispered, "Love you." The feeling that swamped me was indescribable. He gave me hope. This big, ex-felon with a temper, reminded me of how strong I was, and then made me stronger on top of it. "Dex," I exhaled his name. He nipped my ear again. "I love you, Ritz." The scruff of his jaw scraped my own before he bit it gently. "Love your fuckin' face, your that's what she said jokes, your dorky ass high-fives and your arm, but I really fuckin' love how much of a little shit you are. You got nuts bigger than your brother, baby." I choked out a laugh. Dex tipped my head back even further, holding the weight on his long fingers as he bit the curve of my chin. "And those are gonna be my nuts, you little bad ass." Fire shot straight through my chest. "Yeah?" I panted. "Yeah." He nodded, biting my chin even harder. "I already told you I keep what's mine.

All you really need to know about the Paris Ritz is this: by the middle of 1937, Coco Chanel was living in a handsome suite on the third floor, and the bartender—an intuitive mixologist named Frank Meier—had invented the Bloody Mary sixteen summers earlier to cure a Hemingway hangover.

I may have a potty mouth, but I do not get caught in illicit sexual encounters in Marriotts, for fuck’s sake. I guess I could be open to a Ritz-Carlton or a Four Seasons, but a Marriott, no fucking way! Yet here I am. And there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. What spell has this boy cast on me? I

So where—?" asked Robin. "I'm taking you to the Ritz for champagne," said Strike. "Are you serious?" "Yeah. It's why I'm wearing you a suit." For a moment Robin simply looked at him, then she reached up and hugged him tightly. Surrounded by banked flowers, both remembered the hug they'd shared at the top of the stairs on her wedding day, but this time, Robin turned her face and kissed Strike deliberately on the cheek, lips to stubble. "Thanks, Strike. This really means a lot." And that, thought her partner, as the two of them headed away toward the Ritz in the golden glow of the early evening, really was well worth sixty quid and a bit of an effort . . . Out of his subconscious rose the names Mazankov and Krupov, and it was a second or two before he remembered where he'd heard them, why they sounded Cornish, and why he thought of them now. The corners of his mouth twitched, but as Robin didn't see him smiling, he felt no compulsion to explain.

As each day passed the community became more and more indoctrinated into the world of psychobabble. It was used to keep patients in subservient positions. "Poor impulse control," "defiance," or "you want what you want when you want it" were all catch phrases. Pronouncing judgement, Brian said, "These recovery institutions are all alike. Former addicts own and operate them. They're founded on the cliches these individuals accuse us of, grandiosity, arrogance, and selfishness. They take away human dignity and wrap themselves in the AA free spiritual principals, while charging so much money you'd think you were staying at the Ritz in Paris.

Richard Branson's Thoughts While Drinking Coffee at the Ritz I can't decide whether to buy an Aston Martin One-77, a Saleen S7, a Ferrari Enzo, a Leblanc Mirabeau, a Lamborghini Reventon, a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport or a Koenigsegg CCXR. Hmm... What the hell, I'll get them all. It's good to be a fucking billionaire.

The Ritz Hotel was grand, sophisticated, and established, unlike me. The only thing we had in common was façade. Mine may not have been as ornate but it was equally phony. I was presenting myself as an escort; I advertised as one, negotiated like one on the phone, and I identified as one to whoever was interested. I even simulated sex for escort rates.

I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.

Nu ne este dat să cunoaștem momentele rare când oamenii se deschid larg și cea mai ușoară atingere poate veșteji sau tămădui.

If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

Nobody can exist in a cultural vacuum or truly exist outside their historical moment.

I need someone who knows to enjoy life. Someone who'll get high with me at the Pere - Lechaise cemetery. Someone who'll lose their breath running trough the Louvre. Someone who'll go to coffee with a good book ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, Voltaire, A. Camus, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert ). During the weekends to the cafe de Flore, and after that lunch at Ritz. Someone who'll get lost in Paris in the middle of the night. Someone who'll lay beside Seine, drink wine and listen to Florence and Machine, Banks, Borns, Hurts, Bjork, Tom Odelle... Someone who can sit in front of S.Dali's paintings for hours and not talk. Someone who wants to live. Someone who wants to travel and see the world. Someone who'll look at the stars for hours, talk about life, someone who is not afraid of death.

I hadn't told him the news yet, but in that same preternatural way he was always aware of what I was feeling or thinking, he could smell my lies a mile away. He was just giving me time to come to him. To tell him I'd be baking his bun for the next seven and a half months. ''I'm okay." Dex's chuckle filled my ears as he wrapped his arms around my chest from behind, his chin resting on the top of my head. "Just okay?" He was taunting me, I knew it. This man never did anything without a reason. And this reason had him resembling a mama bear. A really aggressive, possessive mama bear. Which said something because Dex was normally that way. I couldn't even sit around Mayhem without him or Sonny within ten feet. I leaned my head back against his chest and laughed. "Yeah, just okay." He made a humming noise deep in his throat. "Ritz," he drawled in that low voice that reached the darkest parts of my organs. "You're killin' me, honey." Oh boy. Did I want to officially break the news on the side of the road with chunks of puke possibly still on my face? Nah. So I went with the truth. "I have it all planned out in my head. I already ordered the cutest little toy motorcycle to tell you, so don't ruin it." A loud laugh burst out of his chest, so strong it rocked my body alongside his. I friggin' loved this guy. Every single time he laughed, I swear it multiplied. At this rate, I loved him more than my own life cubed, and then cubed again. "All right," he murmured between these low chuckles once he'd calmed down a bit. His fingers trailed over the skin of the back of my hand until he stopped at my ring finger and squeezed the slender bone. "I can be patient." That earned him a laugh from me. Patience? Dex? Even after more than three years, that would still never be a term I'd use to describe him. And it probably never would. He'd started to lose his shit during our layover when Trip had called for instructions on how to set the alarm at the new bar. "Dex, Ris, and Baby Locke, you done?" Sonny yelled, peeping out from over the top of the car door. "Are you friggin' kidding me?" I yelled back. Did everyone know? That slow, seductive smile crawled over his features. Brilliant and more affectionate than it was possible for me to handle, it sucked the breath out of me. When he palmed my cheeks and kissed each of my cheeks and nose and forehead, slowly like he was savoring the pecks and the contact, I ate it all up. Like always, and just like I always would. And he answered the way I knew he would every single time I asked him from them on, the way that told me he would never let me down. That he was an immovable object. That he'd always be there for me to battle the demons we could see and the invisible ones we couldn't. "Fuckin' love you, Iris," he breathed against my ear, an arm slinking around my lower back to press us together. "More than anything.

Indeed, it is worth noting that most uses of the words "heaven" or "heavenly" in the New Testament bear little relation to the meanings we have so unscripturally attached to them. For us, heaven is an unearthly, humanly irrelevant condition in which bed-sheeted, paper-winged spirits sit on clouds and play tinkly music until their pipe-cleaner halos drop off from boredom. As we envision it, it contains not one baby's bottom, not one woman's breast, not even one man's bare chest - much less a risen basketball game between glorified "shirts" and "skins." But in Scripture, it is a city with boys and girls playing in the streets; it is buildings put up by a Department of Public Works that uses amethysts for cinder blocks and pearls as big as the Ritz for gates; and indoors, it is a dinner party to end all dinner parties at the marriage supper of the Lamb. It is, in short, earth wedded, not earth jilted. It is the world as the irremovable apple of God's eye.

The faculty member is the student’s natural enemy and if he lets down his guard he is sorry for it later, has a conscience crisis, and feels he has to turn you in. Unless he has prejudiced his own case so badly that he doesn’t wish to call administrative attention to what now appears to be a mutual folly; in this case sullen silence ensues. You may have been teacher’s pet before the weekend, but try to get an A in the course after Monday. Just try it. This is known as academic integrity.

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever. You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.

I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” said Billy Preston. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.

Tender poached egg. Creamy mashed potatoes. And the thick layer of hot, melted cheese! Those are all incredibly delicious, but what takes the cake is the roux! It's been made in a VICHYSSOISE style!" VICHYSSOISE Boiled potatoes, onions, leeks and other ingredients are pureed with cream and soup stock to make this potage. It's often served chilled. Its creation is generally credited to Louis Diat, a French chef at the Ritz Carlton in New York, who first put it on the hotel's menu in 1917. "Amazing! It looks like a thick, heavy dish that would sit in the stomach like lead, but it's so easy to eat!" "The noodles! It's the udon noodles, along with the coriander powder, that makes it feel so much lighter! Coriander is known for its fresh, almost citrusy scent and its mildly spicy bite. It goes exceptionally well with the cumin kneaded into the noodles, each spice working to heighten the other's fragrance. AAAH! It's immensely satisfying!" "I have also included dill, vichyssoise's traditional topping. Dry roasting the dill seeds together with the cumin seeds made a spice mix that gave a strong aroma to the roux." "Hm! Fat noodles in a thick, creamy roux. Eating them is much the same experience as having dipping noodles. What an amazing concept to arrive at from a century-old French soup recipe!

Everyone knew that Chanel was willing to play dirty when it came to the Jewish question. Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, the husband of Pierre Laval’s fashionable daughter, Josée, was already helping her try to have her perfume company taken from the Jewish business partners to whom she had sold a majority stake in the early 1920s.

Nu înțelesese tot ce auzise, dar din privirea ilicită aruncată în viața intimă a celor doi - care, din câte își putea da el seama din firava lui experiență, aveau toată lumea la picioare - trăsese concluzia că pentru absolut toți oamenii viața era o luptă, uneori magnifică dacă o contemplai de departe, dar întodeauna grea, surprinzător de simplă și oarecum tristă.

you can easily substitute your favorite seafood, shrimp, scallops, or any mild white fish also works well. Sometimes I like to mix all three, for a seafood medley! Lazy Lobster Casserole 1 pound fresh lobster meat, chopped into roughly 1 inch pieces 1 stick of butter 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers 2 tablespoons sherry (optional) 2 tablespoons chopped, fresh, flat parsley Melt 3/4 stick of butter in a small bowl.  In a medium casserole dish, place lobster, and pour half the melted butter over and stir to coat.  Add Ritz cracker crumbs and parsley to the remaining melted butter.  Mix well, and then pat over top of lobster meat, until evenly coated. Cut remaining butter into small pieces and dot over top of stuffing. Drizzle sherry evenly over the top, and bake for about 25 minutes at 300 degrees. Serves 3-4

simple obviously being in her mind a key word in dealing with overwhelmed and cranky grooms. “Really really simple and neutral.” It seemed to be registry protocol that the groom should be allowed to select the casual china (I guess for all those Super Bowl parties I would be hosting with the guys, ha ha) while the “formal ware” should be left to the experts: the ladies. “It’s fine,” I said, more curtly than I’d meant to, when I realized they were waiting for me to say something. Plain, white, modern earthenware wasn’t something I could work up a lot of enthusiasm for, particularly when it went for four hundred dollars a plate. It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami,

Credevo che per Barney esistessi solo tu. Almeno questo è quello che dicono tutti. Senti, ambasciator non porta pena, ma secondo me non bisogna mai essere le ultime a sapere, e guarda che parlo per esperienza personale. Dorothy Weaver - tu non la conosci, ma non importa - lo ha visto mercoledì scorso al cocktail dei Johnson. E insomma, il tuo devoto maritino si era appiccicato ad una tizia. Le parlava fitto fitto, le sussurrava paroline all'orecchio. A un certo punto le ha persino massaggiato la schiena, e poi se ne sono andati insieme". "Non mi dici niente di nuovo". "Meno male, perchè l'ultima cosa al mondo che volevo era turbarti". "Vedi, il punto è che quella donna ero io. Usciti dai Johnson siamo andati al Ritz, abbiamo esagerato con lo champagne, e poi - ma guai se lo racconti in giro -, poi ho accettato di andare a casa con lui

PREACHER’S WIFE PINEAPPLE CASSEROLE (Betts Hager) Ingredients 2 (20-ounce) cans pineapple chunks packed in juice, well-drained 3/4 cup sugar 6 tablespoons self-rising flour (see Note below) 2 cups grated Cheddar cheese 4 ounces Ritz crackers 1 stick butter, melted NOTE: Be sure to use self-rising flour, not all-purpose, as it already has the other necessary ingredients included. Instructions Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 2-quart or 8 x 8-inch baking dish with cooking spray. In a medium bowl, mix the sugar and flour. Then, add pineapple and cheese and stir until there are no more dry particles. Spoon this mixture into the prepared baking dish. Crush crackers by pulsing in a food processor and add the melted butter with the machine running until it has the texture of wet sand. Add the crushed cracker mixture to the top of the casserole. Bake about 25 minutes until the top is lightly browned.

To me, Chicago was the bar in the twelfth-floor lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where I drank strawberry daiquiris—sophisticated!—with my visiting parents and with girls I was trying to impress. It was the elegant shops at the new, fancy Water Tower Place. My favorite Chicago spots were primarily restaurants. Dianna’s Opaa, in Greektown on South Halsted Street, with its lanky, serpent-like owner, Petros Kogiones, performing his host duties that were as important as the food—on the nights he wasn’t there, you felt cheated—sliding back his sheet of long black hair to greet his female customers with an overly familiar kiss and their dates with a disarming, arms-flung-wide cry of “cousin!” then conducting his odd 9 p.m. ceremonies, calling up all the engaged couples to be officially blessed by Famous Petros in the name of God, the Greek Orthodox Church, and Dianna’s Opaa! We’d all cheer and raise our juice glasses of Roditis high. Or

None were particularly interesting, although I got a kick out of a note from the Philadelphia Zoo suggesting that since the tiger was not entirely reliable around humans, perhaps Mr. Willing would consider a leopard for his painting instead. It had been a pet until the demise (natural) of its owner and would, if not firmly admonished, climb into a person's lap, purring, and drool copiously. I pulled a sheet of scrap paper (the Stars spent a lot of time sending all-school e-mails about recycling) out of my bag and made a note on the blank side: "Leopard in The Lady in DeNile?" It wasn't my favorite, Cleopatra Awaiting the Return of Anthony. It was a little OTT, loaded with gold and snake imagery and, of course, the leopard. Diana hadn't liked the painting,either, apparently; she was the one who'd given it the Lady in DeNile nickname.I wondered if the leopard had drooled on her. None of the papers were personal, but they were Edward's and some were special, if you knew about his life. There was a bill from the Hotel Ritz in Paris in April 1890, and one from Cartier two months later for a pair of Tahitian pearl drop earrings. Diana was wearing them in my favorite photograph of the two of them: happy and visibly tanned, even in black and white, holding lobsters on a beach in Maine. "I insisted we let them go," Diana wrote in a letter to her niece. "Edward had a snit.He wanted a lobster dinner, but I could not countenance eating a fellow model.