Stationery Quotes

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She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.
David Nicholls (One Day)
There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you'd moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
She would not have understood, then, that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
David Nicholls (One Day)
You might think the world is complicated and full of lost souls, that people who've touched your life and disappeared will never be found, but in the end all of that can change.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
I hate this idea that boys are thinking about sex nonstop and girls are thinking about - what? Stationery and garden gnomes? No.
Julie Murphy (Ramona Blue)
These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.
John Cheever
She could spend an entire afternoon just looking at fountain pens and ink bottles or flipping through books that spoke of poetry and love and loss.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
It is a love from which we never recover.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Yes, she loved him. The truth of that was like a wave that washed over and submerged her in salty torrents, knotting her hair and stinging her nose, pulling the life out from under her. Of course she loved him. The earth was round, day turned into night, he was in front of her and she loved him.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
Whatever you choose for your stationery is your favorite color because it's where you pour your heart out.
Mary E. Pearson (The Miles Between)
May you always be happy and may all your days be filled with beautiful words.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.
Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within)
When Henry’s gone, Alex finds the stationery by the bed: Fromagerie Nicole Barthélémy. Leaving your clandestine hookup directions to a Parisian cheese shop. Alex has to admit: Henry really has a solid handle on his personal brand.
Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
Look at love how it tangles with the one fallen in love Look at spirit how it fuses with earth giving it new.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.
Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within)
The truth is, my young lady, that fate has written the script for your destiny on your forehead from the very beginning. We can't see it. But it's there. And the young, who love so passionately, have no idea how ugly this world is....This world is without compassion.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
In your presence, I found a calm.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
So we stood on the corner by the stationery shop and were deeply insincere with each other. --The Tattered Cloak
Nina Berberova (The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories)
She would not have understood, then, that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die. The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you'd moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Why doesn’t his heart let go? Why do some people stay lodged in our souls, stuck in our throats, imprinted in our minds?
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
She pressed her cheek against his heart and lay there, grateful for the time she’d had with him, however short or long it had been, grateful she had known him, grateful that once, when she was young, she had experienced a love so strong that it did not go away, that decades and distance and miles and children and lies and letters could never make it disappear. She held him in her arms and said to him all she needed to say.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
I believe he collects different types of stationery,' said Vetinari. 'I have sometimes speculated that he might change his life for the better should he meet a young lady willing to dress up as a manila envelope.
Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind, #8))
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Roya’s favorite place in all of Tehran was the Stationery Shop. It was on the corner of Churchill Street and Hafez Avenue, opposite the Russian embassy and right across the street from her school.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
He laughed. And when he did, his face opened up entirely. His eyes carried the laughter; they filled with a kindness that was breathtaking.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
I grabbed his hand and dragged him down the street to a convenience shop. I abandoned him once inside and went down the stationery aisle. I'd already known I wanted to get him some colored pencils, but now I finally had the occasion to do it. Not long after I'd picked out a big box of them, I heard Rafael call out from another part of the store, "Trojans? Like The Iliad?" I didn't waste a second finding him and pulling him out of that aisle.
Rose Christo (Gives Light (Gives Light, #1))
Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.
David Nicholls (One Day)
She found too much cheer undesirable, smacking of falseness. How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years' worth of stultifying rules to observe. Just easy-peasy rolling with the flow.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
When I’m back in my room in my flannel nightgown, I get out my special flowy pen and my good thick stationery, and I start to write. Not a good-bye letter. Just a plain old love letter. Dear Peter…
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
In the fog of jasmine, she kissed him. It was like landing somewhere she should have been all along, a different plane, soft and unbelievably seductive—a place completely theirs but one she’d never dared explore.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color. Whether it’s a row of houses painted in bold swaths of candy hues or a display of colored markers in a stationery shop, vibrant color invariably sparks a feeling of delight.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
She was willing to accept a lot of things, but seeing her old lover for the first time in sixty years while wearing fat Eskimo boots was one of the few things she could not accept.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you’d moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
She knows I hate the color pink, and I’m certain all of her stationery is pink just to spite me.
Catharina Maura (The Temporary Wife (The Windsors, #2))
You might think that the world is complicated and full of lost souls, that people who’ve touched your life and disappeared will never be found, but in the end all of that can change.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Mr. Fakhri kept the shelves stocked with Persian classics and poetry and translations of literature from all over the world.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
No one can take that education away from you once you have it. [...] You can take your degree from the university and put it in your pocket and it will be there for the rest of your life.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Memory is not like a box of stationery—easy to browse, reorder, and read. No, memories accumulate like leaves upon the forest floor. They are irregular and fragile. They crumble and break upon inspection. They turn to soil the deeper you go.
Josiah Bancroft (The Hod King (The Books of Babel, #3))
One day she might forget the helplessness of standing there while words burned. One day she might be far away from this terror. But the smell of charred paper would always be part of her, embedded in her skin.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Whenever I cut myself, I always grab a stack of stationery and write my signature on as many sheets as I can before it coagulates, because I think that in this era of text messages and emails, people still appreciate a desperate, hand-written letter signed in blood.
John Scheck
Look at love How it tangles With the one fallen in love Look at spirit How it fuses with earth Giving it new life
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop of Tehran)
It is a love for which we never recover.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
It'll still be stationery no matter how much you push the envelope.
Santosh Kalwar (Gags and Extracts)
Because sometimes women cry when there’s good news. Tears of relief. You know, catharsis.” His expression was utterly blank. “Haven’t you ever cried when you, I don’t know, you get a new batch of that fancy stationery you like with the watermarks on it?” He looked bewildered. “That’s what you think I’d cry tears of relief about?” “You do like your office supplies.
Chloe Neill (Biting Bad (Chicagoland Vampires, #8))
Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For, there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
Like good stationery, heavy pens, unlined paper, they represented to her the possibility of imagination, a possibility so much finer in itself and more delicate than anything she had ever managed to imagine.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Does helping others really confer happiness or prosperity on the helper? I know of no evidence showing that altruists gain money from their altruism, but the evidence suggests that they often gain happiness. People who do volunteer work are happier and healthier than those who don’t; but, as always, we have to contend with the problem of reverse correlation: Congenitally happy people are just plain nicer to begin with,24 so their volunteer work may be a consequence of their happiness, not a cause. The happiness-as-cause hypothesis received direct support when the psychologist Alice Isen25 went around Philadelphia leaving dimes in pay phones. The people who used those phones and found the dimes were then more likely to help a person who dropped a stack of papers (carefully timed to coincide with the phone caller’s exit), compared with people who used phones that had empty coin-return slots. Isen has done more random acts of kindness than any other psychologist: She has distributed cookies, bags of candy, and packs of stationery; she has manipulated the outcome of video games (to let people win); and she has shown people happy pictures, always with the same finding: Happy people are kinder and more helpful than those in the control group.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
Everything—every detail, every word, every second, every person—reminded Roya of Marigold. Except that reminded wasn’t the right word. Reminded meant that she had to forget to remember again. But she never forgot. Everything was linked to Marigold; nothing, really, could be separated from her ever.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
No mom to come home to, call on the phone, cook a favorite dish with. No mom to tell her that everything would be all right.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop of Tehran)
Some things stay with you, haunt you. Some embers nestle into your skin.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
This time she didn’t add the obligatory exclamation mark that seemed necessary for covering up misery around here.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Roya leaned against the shelves lined with books as Bahman talked, her back digging into the spines of poetry and politics. If he went on too long about representation and taxes and trade, she simply focused on his eyes, lost, but in the best of ways.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Would you excuse us for just one moment?" she said to the Lynburn. "My colleague and I need to confer in our office." With that, she hauled Angela into the empty stationery cupboard and shut the door behind them. In the darkness, Angela asked, "Why am I in a cupboard?
Sarah Rees Brennan (Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy, #1))
I don't know why people start thank you notes with the word 'just'. Just a quick note to thank you for a wonderful time. Just wanted to say thanks for everything. It reduces expecations right from the start. It says: I understand the importance of saying thank you, but I won't be writing a letter. It says: I'd like to follow the best social conventions, but I won't be spending that much time on it. I've even seen stationery that has "Just a note" printed on the front. If you start there, why write the note at all? Consider the synonyms: merely, barely. Would you write: barely a note to thank you for the visit? Merely a hasty parargaph to acknowledge all you did for me?
Jessica Francis Kane (Rules for Visiting)
How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years’ worth of stultifying rules to observe.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Please excuse the torn edges of this note. I am writing to you from inside the shack the Baudelaire orphans were forced to live in while at Prufrock Preparatory School, and I am afraid that some of the crabs tried to snatch my stationery away from me. On Sunday night, please purchase a ticket for seat 10-J at the Erratic Opera Company’s performance of the opera Faute de Mieux. During Act Five, use a sharp knife to rip open the cushion of your seat. There you should find
Lemony Snicket (The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #4))
Just months ago [...] She would not have understood [...] that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too. She wished she could get a dog, but Dov’s building didn’t allow them.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
When Kyle arrived, a small pocket of air had been let into their tightly wrapped bubble of privacy and pain.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop of Tehran)
peasy. See ya! Maybe there was something to these Americanisms. Breezy. Casual. They made everything seem like strawberry milkshakes and good times coming.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
What’s your favorite book?” “I don’t have one.” “Oh, it’s just that . . . I assumed you loved to read.” “I do. I mean I don’t have just one. Too many.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
An enormous amount of what she used to believe had been erased.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop of Tehran)
Rumi: The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
If only she could somehow shield him from danger, from loss, from grief.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
His eyes were joyful and filled with hope. “I am fortunate to meet you,” he said.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Behind the blue blazer he wore, Roya was aware of an innocence that most people would give anything to own. She envied him this simplicity, this lack of complication
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Ice frozen over a melted layer is even harder to break than before.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. Harry Truman
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
After the film, he had walked with her in the summer twilight. The sky was lavender and layered with shades of purple so varied, they seemed impossible.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
I told you, Roya Khanom. The boy wants to change the world. That requires rush.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
For that fraction of time, he was entirely hers.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
how different it would be if others weren’t always greedy for their oil. He wrote about how the British and the Russians competed for influence in their country.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
summer twilight that was so beautiful she ached. The sky was an eggplant purple, the clouds the color of bruises.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
This was the societal web of niceties and formalities and expected good female behavior that often suffocated her.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Better than being here with your throat choked by a dictator and with a government that can shoot at will.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
The letter wasn't at all in Milo's style. He would have issued a much more elegant threat on vastly superior stationery.
Ashley Weaver (Murder at the Brightwell (Amory Ames Mystery, #1))
Government departments are arranged hierarchically; those at the top are used to issuing orders and expect them to be carried out by their subordinates right down the line. Minow assumed that a cultural institution like television has a similar hierarchical structure, as if television executives could requisition more creative programming the way a bureaucrat orders new pencils or department stationery.
Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism)
Who are they for? Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share is intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o'clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we've ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes. Also, the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationery, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny post cards, make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops.
Truman Capote (A Christmas Memory)
I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from.
Agatha Christie (Come, Tell Me How You Live)
I want you to get out a nice note card or piece of stationery and write a letter to yourself. Yes. To yourself. In it, encourage yourself with what you have learned from this journey. What do you need to work on? Why do you need to work on it? What relationships are being damaged or precious time and memories lost because of how you interact with those in your life, whether they are family, friend, or even foe? Spend some time thinking about this and then let your pen and paper do the talking.
Karen Ehman (Keep It Shut: What to Say, How to Say It, and When to Say Nothing at All)
The Tintin look-alike who had sauntered into that California café, who said to her “Sound like a plan?” whose memories of lobster summers and sledding winters seemed like they’d come straight out of an American film at Cinema Metropole, soothed her.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
Feeding (more on this in chapter 8) Breast pump Breast pads Breast cream (Lansinoh) Breast milk containers Twin nursing pillow Boppy Formula Baby bottles (8-oz. wide neck; 16–20 bottles if you’re doing formula exclusively) Dishwasher baskets Bottle brush High chairs Booster seat Food processor or immersion blender Bottle warmer Bottle drying rack Bowls and spoons Baby food storage containers Keepsakes Baby books Thank-you notes/stationery Newspaper from birthday CD player/dock for music Twin photo albums/frames
Natalie Díaz (What to Do When You're Having Two: The Twins Survival Guide from Pregnancy Through the First Year)
The truth is, my young lady, that fate has written the script for your destiny on your forehead from the very beginning. We can’t see it. But it’s there. And the young, who love so passionately, have no idea how ugly this world is.” He rested both hands on the counter. “This world is without compassion.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial “diversity” through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups. Composite SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asian Americans had to meet the general standards. For athletes “lower cut-offs” were permissible.52 Given that composite SAT scores begin at 400 (out of a possible 1600) a requirement of 520 is really a requirement to earn only 120 points out of a possible 1200 points earned.
Thomas Sowell (Inside American Education)
The Noser and the Note The Head Rifler of an insolvent bank, learning that it was about to be visited by the official Noser into Things, placed his own personal note for a large amount among its resources, and, gaily touching his guitar, awaited the inspection.  When the Noser came to the note he asked, “What’s this?” “That,” said the Assistant Pocketer of Deposits, “is one of our liabilities.” “A liability?” exclaimed the Noser.  “Nay, nay, an asset.  That is what you mean, doubtless.” “Therein you err,” the Pocketer explained; “that note was written in the bank with our own pen, ink, and paper, and we have not paid a stationery bill for six months.” “Ah, I see,” the Noser said, thoughtfully; “it is a liability.  May I ask how you expect to meet it?” “With fortitude, please God,” answered the Assistant Pocketer, his eyes to Heaven raising—“with fortitude and a firm reliance on the laxity of the law.” “Enough, enough,” exclaimed the faithful servant of the State, choking with emotion; “here is a certificate of solvency.” “And here is a bottle of ink,” the grateful financier said, slipping it into the other’s pocket; “it is all that we have.
Ambrose Bierce (Fantastic Fables)
The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic. There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at. No headboards were broken. No screaming. Honestly, it was probably the longest time we’d ever spent together without talking. Only one thing followed type: Afterward, when I had my face resting against Augustus’s chest, listening to his heart pound, Augustus said, “Hazel Grace, I literally cannot keep my eyes open.” “Misuse of literality,” I said. “No,” he said. “So. Tired.” His face turned away from me, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to his lungs settle into the rhythm of sleep. After a while, I got up, dressed, found the Hotel Filosoof stationery, and wrote him a love letter:
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
What’s the, like, symbol, for five years? Paper?” “Paper is first year,” I said. At the end of Year One’s unexpectedly wrenching treasure hunt, Amy presented me with a set of posh stationery, my initials embossed at the top, the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist. In return, I’d presented my wife with a bright red dime-store paper kite, picturing the park, picnics, warm summer gusts. Neither of us liked our presents; we’d each have preferred the other’s. It was a reverse O. Henry. “Silver?” guessed Go. “Bronze? Scrimshaw? Help me out.” “Wood,” I said. “There’s no romantic present for wood.” At the other end of the bar, Sue neatly folded her newspaper and left it on the bartop with her empty mug and a five-dollar bill. We all exchanged silent smiles as she walked out. “I got it,” Go said. “Go home, fuck her brains out, then smack her with your penis and scream, ‘There’s some wood for you, bitch!’ 
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
One day she might forget the helplessness of standing there while words burned. One day she might be far away from this terror. But the smell of charred paper would always be part of her, embedded in her skin. As she stood in front of the burning shop, she remembered the traditional bonfires lit before Persian new Year, how she and Zari jumped over the flames squealing with joy, their faces flushed from the heat, their hearts soaring. Soon there would be nothing.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
She pressed her cheek against his heart and lay there, grateful for the time she’d had with him, however short or long it had been, grateful she had known him, grateful that once, when she was young, she had experienced a love so strong that it did not go away, that decades and distance and miles and children and lies and letters could never make it disappear. She held him in her arms and said to him all she needed to say. For that fraction of time, he was entirely hers.
Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop)
I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.
Will Self
The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.
Mark Monmonier (From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame)
He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’ I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s roads . . . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘Do you take for me a sap?’ The centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don’t reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I wouldn’t have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock. ‘The centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The “Well of Truth” as it’s been known since the eleventh century.’ He was delighted. I’d delivered. He said, ‘You know, you and I could do great things together. It’s a pity I’m already “beyond redemption”, even at this very moment.’ His unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin. ‘Look. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he’d drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well. ‘Well, now, you see, it’s always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later — a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days — the same thing happens at old La Frite’s place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echo Then he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced. In conclusion he said, ‘I’m the biggest swindler there is, I’m prepared to be swindled myself, that’s fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it’s Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That’s when I lose my cool: I hit back. It’s as if that’s what I was there for.
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)