Store Opening Invitation Quotes

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss. The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If you were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile. Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling. Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss over and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C. But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

He played the opening bars again, opening a door for her, inviting her to join. She started quietly, almost voiceless, only a thin string of sound weaving herself into his tune, as if her voice were just another string on the guitar between his fingers. She had to be careful, so no one saw the changes on her face. But she didn't want to be careful; she couldn't be careful. He played and she sang to him, and inside her more and more blocks of ice began to melt, cracking and falling into the frozen sea between them. She sang of all the things that were happening to her and him, the world that collapsed over both of them, the things that might be in store, if only they dared to believe it was possible.

when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey i stopped saying the words “please” and “i’m sorry” i walked into grocery stores and bought too many clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget every time i wanted to tell you “i’m sorry”, i wrote you a poem instead, i said things like “i hope your mother calls you beautiful” to strangers and when boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on dates i didn’t hesitate no, didn’t even stop them when their hands grazed my breasts and when they moaned my name against my thighs i cried i opened the mail and didn’t tell anyone for a week that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk, when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn’t like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was older and didn’t say things like “it doesn’t matter” and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i couldn’t understand why my bones felt like cages, i walked around art museums until closing, watched them lock up the gates and then open them up again the very same morning, i thought about clocks and how time was a deception of my fingertips, i had stars growing inside of me into constellations, and only when some man on the 9 AM bus asked me for the time did i realize that you cannot run from light igniting your lungs, you cannot run from yourself.

we have an entirely new set-up. We have a safe tunnel leading to three of the finest stores in the world!” “We do indeed!” said Badger. “I’ve seen ’em!” “And you know what this means?” said Mr. Fox. “It means that none of us need ever go out into the open again!” There was a buzz of excitement around the table. “I therefore invite you all,” Mr. Fox went on, “to stay here with me for ever.” “For ever!” they cried. “My goodness! How marvellous!” And Rabbit said to Mrs. Rabbit, “My dear, just think! We’re never going to be shot at again in our lives!” “We will make,” said Mr. Fox, “a little underground village, with streets and houses on each side—separate houses for Badgers and Moles and Rabbits and Weasels and Foxes. And every day I will go shopping for you all. And every day we will eat like kings.

How do you usually celebrate Christmas, cousin?” He hesitated before replying, seeming to ponder whether to answer truthfully. Honesty won out. “On Christmas Day I visit friends in a parasitical fashion, going from house to house and drinking until I finally fall unconscious in someone’s parlor. Then someone pours me into a carriage and sends me home, and my servants put me to bed.” “That doesn’t sound very merry,” Cassandra said. “Beginning this year,” Devon said, “I intend for us all to do the holiday justice. In fact, I’ve invited a friend to share Christmas with us at Eversby Priory.” The table fell silent, everyone staring at him in collective surprise. “Who?” Kathleen asked suspiciously. For his sake, she hoped it wasn’t one of those railway men plotting to destroy tenant farms. “Mr. Winterborne himself.” Amid the girls’ gasping and squealing, Kathleen scowled at Devon. Damn him, he knew it wasn’t right to invite a stranger to a house of mourning. “The owner of a department store?” she asked. “No doubt accompanied by a crowd of fashionable friends and hangers-on? My lord, surely you haven’t forgotten that we’re all in mourning!” “How could I?” he parried with a pointed glance that incensed her. “Winterborne will come alone, as a matter of fact. I doubt it will burden my household unduly to set one extra plate at the table on Christmas Eve.” “A gentleman of Mr. Winterborne’s influence must already have a thousand invitations for the holiday. Why must he come here?” Devon’s eyes glinted with enjoyment at her barely contained fury. “Winterborne is a private man. I suppose the idea of a quiet holiday in the country appeals to him. For his sake, I would like to have a proper Christmas feast. And perhaps a few carols could be sung.” The girls chimed in at once. “Oh, do say yes, Kathleen!” “That would be splendicious!” Even Helen murmured something to the effect that she couldn’t see how it would do any harm. “Why stop there?” Kathleen asked sarcastically, giving Devon a look of open animosity. “Why not have musicians and dancing, and a great tall tree lit with candles?” “What excellent suggestions,” came Devon’s silky reply. “Yes, let’s have all of that.” Infuriated to the point of speechlessness, Kathleen glared at him while Helen discreetly pried the butter knife from her clenched fingers.

It was as if I had stepped outside something of which I had always, unconsciously, been a part of and was seeing it for the first time – this stream of life, this cycle of ordinary living that goes on within and around us all the time. I knew that in a moment, when I went through my parents’ door, I would become a part of it again and lose this acute sense of being a witness, alone and completely with myself and my own thoughts. I knew I would be swept up in the hugs and exclamations of surprise and greetings, the sharing of news and the sounds and smells of bacon and eggs and coffee – the irresistible tide of living in the world. But for this moment, I was with the world, watching it but somehow not in it. I was alone with myself. I paused on the patio outside the back door, prolonging the moment. I was alone, lost to everyone and yet not lost but there, on the doorstep. I knew that home was as much in the slow walk alone through the quiet streets as it was in the arrival at the store. Home was in the taste of being with myself, walking next to what was familiar, toward what was cherished. Then I open the door, cross the threshold with conscious deliberation, and called out, “Isn’t anyone in here up yet?” As my mother came into the kitchen, I glanced back outside, and in my mind’s eye I saw that other young woman standing there - backpack on, watching us and grinning at me. I knew I would get back to her. I had met myself walking home in the dawn, and I liked the company I kept in those empty moments. Tell me, have you met yourself? Have you been able to step outside the business of life for just one moment and look in from the outside, feeling yourself whole and separate and yet with the world?

Senior Wal-Mart officials concentrated on setting goals, measuring progress, and maintaining communication lines with employees at the front lines and with official agencies when they could. In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked. Wal-Mart’s emergency operations team even included a member of the Red Cross. (The federal government declined Wal-Mart’s invitation to participate.) The team also opened a twenty-four-hour call center for employees, which started with eight operators but rapidly expanded to eighty to cope with the load. Along the way, the team discovered that, given common goals to do what they could to help and to coordinate with one another, Wal-Mart’s employees were able to fashion some extraordinary solutions. They set up three temporary mobile pharmacies in the city and adopted a plan to provide medications for free at all of their stores for evacuees with emergency needs—even without a prescription. They set up free check cashing for payroll and other checks in disaster-area stores. They opened temporary clinics to provide emergency personnel with inoculations against flood-borne illnesses. And most prominently, within just two days of Katrina’s landfall, the company’s logistics teams managed to contrive ways to get tractor trailers with food, water, and emergency equipment past roadblocks and into the dying city. They were able to supply water and food to refugees and even to the National Guard a day before the government appeared on the scene. By the end Wal-Mart had sent in a total of 2,498 trailer loads of emergency supplies and donated $3.5 million in merchandise to area shelters and command centers. “If the American government had responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” Jefferson Parish’s top official, Aaron Broussard, said in a network television interview at the time.

Those whom God has mercy in store for he first brings into a wilderness.

before,” he said. I tilted my head and took a good look at the space. “Was it just like this? The layout, I mean. Did you have places to sit?” “There were two tables,” he said. I walked toward the curtained-off nook, thinking about the current placement of the bookshelves. There was a lot of wasted space. The building was sizable, and Joe had everything spread out. It did make it feel open and airy, but it wasn’t a very efficient use of the square footage. “What if we had more seating?” I asked. “Not just a couple of tables, put there as an afterthought, but a whole section. There’s room if we move things around.” I gestured toward the rear of the store. “And we’re using that whole area for storage, but couldn’t we put that stuff in the back room? It would free up a ton of space.” “Space for what?” “For people.” I paused for a moment, thinking. “What if this wasn’t just a bookstore? What if it was like… a gathering place? We need ways to encourage people to come in and shop here, instead of ordering online or going to one of the big chain stores.” “Well, sure,” he said. “That’s why we have our local authors section, and the staff recommendations. Those are popular with customers.” “Yeah, but is it enough?” I asked. “If you had places for people to sit, you could host some of those local authors. Invite them to do readings. Open it up to book

The day he came to PARC for his job interview, Rick Jones invited him into his office and asked him a stock question. “What do you think your greatest achievement will be at PARC?” he asked. “It’ll be a personal computer,” Kay replied. “What’s that?” Spying a flat portfolio on Jones’s desk the size of a student’s notebook, Kay seized it and flipped it open. “This will be a flat-panel display,” he said, indicating the cover, which he held upright. “There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.” He walked out, leaving Jones scratching his head and saying to himself, “Yeah, right.