“
I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life)
“
He's horrible."
"But effective. Being angry at Kaz for being ruthless is like being angry at a stove for being hot.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
“
Nina—” Inej murmured.
“Don’t you start in on me.”
“It will all work out. Let Kaz do what he does best.”
“He’s horrible.”
“But effective. Being angry at Kaz for being ruthless is like being angry at a stove for being hot. You know what he is.”
Nina crossed her arms. “I’m mad at you, too.”
“Me? Why?”
“I don’t know yet. I just am.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
“
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
”
”
Albert Einstein
“
Do you know what pain is, Cammie? It’s the
body’s physical response to imminent harm.
It is the mind’s way of telling us to move our
hand off the stove or let go of the broken
glass.
”
”
Ally Carter (Out of Sight, Out of Time (Gallagher Girls, #5))
“
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
”
”
Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
Sometimes I think I'll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.
”
”
Dorothy Parker
“
Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!
”
”
Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man)
“
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
”
”
Albert Einstein
“
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
”
”
Mark Twain
“
These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
”
”
Laura Ingalls Wilder (The Long Winter (Little House, #6))
“
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is; a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its own message.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (America)
“
I smell pancakes," Al said as he jauntily smacked Pierce's hat back on the witch's head. "Did the runt make you breakfast?" Al said, leaning over the stove. "Quickest way to a woman's crotch is through her gullet, eh?" he said, leering at Pierce, who was now rinsing out the percolator. "Is it working? I'd be curious to know. I'd buy her a cake or something.
”
”
Kim Harrison (Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows, #8))
“
November 20. Andrius's birthday. I had counted the days carefully. I wished him a happy birthday when I woke and thought about him while hauling logs during the day. At night, I sat by the light of the stove, reading Dombey and Son. Krasivaya. I still hadn't found the word. Maybe I'd find it if I jumped ahead. I flipped through some of the pages. A marking caught my eye. I leafed backward. Something was written in pencil in the margin of 278.
Hello, Lina. You've gotten to page 278. That's pretty good!
I gasped, then pretened I was engrossed in the book. I looked at Andrius's handwritting. I ran my finger over this elongated letters in my name. Were there more? I knew I should read onward. I couldn't wait. I turned though the pages carefully, scanning the margins.
Page 300:
Are you really on page 300 or are you skipping ahead now?
I had to stifle my laughter.
Page 322:
Dombey and Son is boring. Admit it.
Page 364:
I'm thinking of you.
Page 412:
Are you maybe thinking of me?
I closed my eyes.
Yes, I'm thinking of you. Happy birthday, Andrius.
”
”
Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray)
“
So often the pain of our life is no more than a reminder to take our hand off the stove.
”
”
Richard Paul Evans (The Carousel (The Locket, #3))
“
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
”
”
Robert Frost
“
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
”
”
Charles Baudelaire (On Wine and Hashish (Hesperus Classics))
“
I understand addiction now. I never did before, you know. How could a man (or a woman) do something so self-destructive, knowing that they’re hurting not only themselves, but the people they love? It seemed that it would be so incredibly easy for them to just not take that next drink. Just stop. It’s so simple, really. But as so often happens with me, my arrogance kept me from seeing the truth of the matter.
I see it now though.
Every day, I tell myself it will be the last. Every night, as I’m falling asleep in his bed, I tell myself that tomorrow I’ll book a flight to Paris, or Hawaii, or maybe New York. It doesn’t matter where I go, as long as it’s not here. I need to get away from Phoenix—away from him—before this goes even one step further.
And then he touches me again, and my convictions disappear like smoke in the wind.
This cannot end well. That’s the crux of the matter, Sweets. I’ve been down this road before—you know I have—and there’s only heartache at the end. There’s no happy ending waiting for me like there was for you and Matt. If I stay here with him, I will become restless and angry. It’s happening already, and I cannot stop it. I’m becoming bitter and terribly resentful. Before long, I will be intolerable, and eventually, he’ll leave me. But if I do what I have to do, what my very nature compels me to do, and move on, the end is no better. One way or another, he’ll be gone. Is it not wiser to end it now, Sweets, before it gets to that point? Is it not better to accept that this happiness I have is destined to self-destruct?
Tomorrow I will leave. Tomorrow I will stop delaying the inevitable. Tomorrow I will quit lying to myself, and to him.
Tomorrow.
What about today, you ask? Today it’s already too late. He’ll be home soon, and I have dinner on the stove, and wine chilling in the fridge. And he will smile at me when he comes through the door, and I will pretend like this fragile, dangerous thing we have created between us can last forever.
Just one last time, Sweets. Just one last fix. That’s all I need.
And that is why I now understand addiction.
”
”
Marie Sexton (Strawberries for Dessert (Coda, #4; Strawberries for Dessert, #1))
“
It feels sort of euphoric, like we're in some sort of fairytale. Like she's Tinkerbell and I'm Peter Pan. No, wait. I don't want to be Peter Pan. Maybe she can be like Cinderella and I'll be her Prince Charming. Yeah, I like that fantasy better. Cinderella's hot when she's all poor and sweaty and slaving over the stove.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (Finding Cinderella (Hopeless, #2.5))
“
If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.
”
”
Mark Twain
“
Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.
”
”
Irving Layton (The Selected Poems)
“
Its funny how certain objects convey a message -- my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing something. My numbers are off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary and says only one thing: "You are going to die.
”
”
David Sedaris
“
Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories)
“
The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
”
”
Anna Quindlen (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake)
“
Count Olaf certainly does sound evil. Imagine forcing children to stand near a stove!
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #3))
“
And Tiffany knew that if a witch started thinking of anyone as "just" anything, that would be the first step on a well-worn path that could lead to, oh, to poisoned apples, spinning wheels, and a too-small stove... and to pain, and terror, and horror and the darkness.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld, #41; Tiffany Aching, #5))
“
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
”
”
M.F.K. Fisher
“
Listen, Bob. A gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel- or an axe or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good- and as bad- as the man who carries it. Remember that.
”
”
Jack Schaefer
“
She wandered over to the enclosed range, a rather modern-looking contraption that Cook had purchased earlier in the year. “Do you know how to work this?” she asked.
“No idea. You?”
Daphne shook her head. “None.” She reached forward and gingerly touched the surface of the stove top. “It's not hot.”
“Not even a little bit?”
She shook her head. “It's rather cold, actually.”
Brother and sister were silent for a few seconds.
“You know,” Anthony finally said, “cold milk might be quite refreshing.”
“I was just thinking that very thing!
”
”
Julia Quinn (The Duke and I (Bridgertons, #1))
“
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
”
”
Elizabeth Bishop (The Complete Poems 1927-1979)
“
It’s just...” She scrubbed a hand across her face. “I keep looking for someone to share life with, someone patient. Not afraid of a mop or use the stove. Even-tempered, understanding, not allergic to emotion.” She closed her eyes momentarily. “Someone sweet.”
Hunter stifled a grimace. She was describing a female with a penis.
”
”
Shayla Black (Surrender to Me (Wicked Lovers, #4))
“
Come to think of it, that word (choice) shouldn't be applied to people's destinies. Ever. Choice should be relegated to TV and meals:
You could choose NBC over CBS or steak instead of chicken. But take the concept any further than the stove or the remote
control and the word just didn't apply.
- V
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #5))
“
Sometimes someone says something and their words are like the catch of a gas stove, the click, click while you’re waiting for it to light up and flame big and blue...
”
”
Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X)
“
If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of."
"That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have, but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
”
”
Laura Ingalls Wilder (The Long Winter (Little House, #6))
“
I don’t need to keep you a secret, Elena,” he said, going to tend to his pan on the stove. “I just don’t have the patience to listen to what people think I should do with what’s mine.” Mine.
”
”
Danielle Lori (The Sweetest Oblivion (Made, #1))
“
It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.
”
”
Peter Heller (The Dog Stars)
“
From then on, Matilda would visit the library only once a week in order to take out new books and return the old ones. Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. She was not quite tall enough to reach things around in the kitchen, but she kept a small box in the outhouse which she brought in and stood on in order to get whatever she wanted. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it. Occasionally she made Bovril or Ovaltine. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Matilda)
“
Let me inform you of something," he says in a low voice. "The moment my lips touch yours, it will be your first kiss. Because if you've never felt anything when someone's kissed you, then no one's ever really kissed you. Not the way I plan on kissing you."
He drops his hands and keeps his eyes locked on mine while he backs up to the stove.
He turns around to tend to the pasta like he didn't just ruin me for any other guy for the rest of my life.
I can't feel my legs, so I do the only thing I can. I slide down the refrigerator until my butt meets the floor and I inhale.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (Hopeless (Hopeless, #1))
“
If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.
”
”
Truman Capote
“
..One has to be a mindless barbarian to burn such beauty in a stove, to destroy what we can not create..
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya)
“
We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.
”
”
Bill Holm (The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland)
“
A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.
”
”
Dan Carlin (The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses)
“
The Kitchen
Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil;
lately, your husband’s mind has been elsewhere.
Honeyed dates, goat’s milk;
you want to quiet the bloating of salt.
Coconut and ghee butter;
he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.
Cayenne and roasted pine nuts;
you offer him the hollow of your throat.
Saffron and rosemary;
you don’t ask him her name.
Vine leaves and olives;
you let him lift you by the waist.
Cinnamon and tamarind;
lay you down on the kitchen counter.
Almonds soaked in rose water;
your husband is hungry.
Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon;
he had forgotten the way you taste.
Sour dough and cumin;
but she cannot make him eat, like you.
”
”
Warsan Shire (Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth)
“
Grief does strange things to people’s minds. This I know. One morning a couple of weeks after my mother died, my dad said he thought he could smell her cheesy grits cooking on the stove—my favorite and my mother’s specialty. Once, I heard her humming down the hall from my bedroom. Something so mundane and simple, so regular and small, that for a moment, the prior weeks were just a nightmare, and I was awake now and she was alive. Death moves faster than brains do.
”
”
Tracy Deonn (Legendborn (Legendborn, #1))
“
We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Abaddon's Gate (Expanse, #3))
“
Mother, do you grieve?
Know that I will return to you. I will be a flutter in the leaves above where you sit, cooking ruti on the stove. I will be the stray cloud which shields you from the days of sun. I will be the thunder that wakes you before rain floods the room.
When you walk to the market, I will return to you as footprint on the soil. At night, when you close your eyes, I will appear as impress on the bed.
”
”
Megha Majumdar (A Burning)
“
Kid 1: *examining my gorgeous strawberry and blueberry pies*: Wow, Mom, your pies don’t look awful this time.
Me (Ilona): ...
~A little later~
Kid 2: *wandering into the kitchen*
Kid 1: Hey, you’ve got to see these pies. *opening the stove*
Kid 2: Wow. They are not ugly this time.
Kid 1: I know, right?
”
”
Ilona Andrews
“
I bought some crackers and a piece of hoop cheese and an apple at a grocery store and sat on a nail keg by the stove and had a cheap yet nourishing lunch. You know what they say, "Enough is as good as a feast.
”
”
Charles Portis (True Grit)
“
I could make better pie-type love with a new stove!
I heard his disembodied voice shout back, “Dick territory, babe. Don’t even think about it unless I’m there.”
“Chick territory,” I kept shouting. “A stove’s in the kitchen!”
“It’s got a plug and weighs over fifty pounds. Totally dick,” he shot back on his own shout.
I gave in, turning to the plans while giggling.
Totally dick.
My old may was funny.
”
”
Kristen Ashley (Sweet Dreams (Colorado Mountain, #2))
“
I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want?
”
”
Laurie Notaro (It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy)
“
Oh, silly woman! Leave your stove, your pots and pans and chores, even if only for one day! Come out and see the sun in the sky and the river in the distance!
”
”
Christopher Morley (Parnassus On Wheels)
“
I just . . . knew, the way you know how to breathe or to pull your hand back from a hot stove.
”
”
Lilith Saintcrow (Betrayals (Strange Angels, #2))
“
The green-eyed angel came in less than a half hour and fell docile as a lamb into my arms. We kissed and caressed, I met no resistance when I unlaced the strings to free her dress and fill myself in the moist and hot bed nature made between her thighs. We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
You know what?' said Vimes aloud. 'This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.'
Then you've got to stop them. You can't let them kill it!' said Lady Ramkin.
Vimes blinked at her.
Pardon?' he said.
It's wounded!'
Lady, that was the intention, wasn't it? Anyway, it's only stunned,' said Vimes.
I mean you can't let them kill it like this,' said Lady Ramkin insistently. 'Poor thing!'
What do you want to do, then?' demanded Vimes, his temper unravelling. 'Give it a strengthening dose of tar oil and a nice comfy basket in front of the stove?'
It's butchery!'
Suits me fine!'
But it's a dragon! It's just doing what a dragon does! It never would have come here if people had left it alone!'
Vimes thought: it was about to eat her, and she can still think like this. He hesitated. Perhaps that did give you the right to an opinion...
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8))
“
We made love outdoors
Without a roof, I like most,
Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
I'll never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that second place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead m sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down, Saved you, I'd think, holding their souls in midair as the rest of their being-their physical shells-plummeted to the earth. All of them were like, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold.
”
”
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
“
the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Crack-Up)
“
We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
”
”
C.G. Jung
“
One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physicist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” What if looking at the pretty girl felt like putting your hand on a hot stove? What was that? Quantum mechanics?
”
”
Matt Haig (The Humans)
“
German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
I walked in without knocking. The screen door banged to a close behind me announcing my presence. I followed my nose to the kitchen and found Kaleb standing by the stove. He stirred something that smelled absolutely delicious a wooden spoon in one hand and a huge chef’s knife in the other.
“Are you sober?” I asked from the doorway.
He turned and leveled a smile at me that made me a little wobbly. “I am."
“Good. Because if not I was going to take the deadly kitchen utensil away from you.” I crossed the room and pulled myself up to sit on the counter beside the stove. A cutting board full of green peppers and two uncut stalks of celery waited for attention from the knife. Melted butter and diced onions bubbled in a sauté pan on the stove. “You cook."
Kaleb was so pretty I was jealous. Pretty with ripped muscles and a tattoo of a red dragon covering most of his upper body. “Yes,” he said. “I cook.”
“Do you usually wear a wife beater and,” I pushed him back a little by his shoulder “an apron that says ‘Kiss the Cook’ while you’re doing it? ”
He leaned so close to me my heart skipped a couple of beats. “I’ll wear it all the time if you’ll consider it.
”
”
Myra McEntire (Hourglass (Hourglass, #1))
“
So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that, too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn and burn until it was destroyed.
”
”
Johann Hari (Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions)
“
I'll accept your apology on one condition." He folded his arms across his chest.
"Anything?"
"You trust me."
I cocked my head to the side. "I trust you, Cam."
"No, you don't." He walked over to my small table and pulled out a chair. "Have a seat."
Sitting down, I tugged the hem of his shirt down as he headed back to the stove, putting the tiny skillet over the burner.
"If you trusted me, you wouldn't have reacted the way you did," he simply said, cracking an egg. "And that's not me judging you or any of that kind of shit. You got to trust me that I'm not going to be an ass or freak out over that kind of stuff. You have to trust that I care enough about you.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Wait for You (Wait for You, #1))
“
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches, when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to do things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.
”
”
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
“
To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.
”
”
Edward Abbey (Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast)
“
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight—sunlight one hundred million years old—is heating your home tonight . . .
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
Much as the pain of touching a hot stove teaches you not to touch it again, the sadness of being alone teaches you not to do the things that made you feel so alone again. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change. Look,
”
”
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
“
Though the kitchen's decor stinks, the smell of something wonderful pulls me away from Charlie's chattering. Bacon. Right there cooking on the stove. Yeah, I know. I'm dead. But I can still eat like a sumo wrestler. And if that deliciousness isn't on a plate in front of me within two minutes, I'm eating it straight from the pan.
”
”
Victoria Scott (The Collector (Dante Walker, #1))
“
Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. [...] Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of---not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
“
Everybody is so happy, and no one has a thought for you. And this is what happens to me everywhere and always. Everyone has marked out his own little spot on the Earth, his warm stove, his cup of coffee, his wife, his glass of wine in the evening, and is quite content with that;[...]I don't feel at ease anywhere. It is as if I always arrive a second too late, as if all the world had utterly failed to take me into account.
”
”
Joseph von Eichendorff (Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts)
“
She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
“
This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.
It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul
"Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!"
My soul does not reply.
"Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?"
My soul remains mute.
"Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty."
Not a word. -- Is my soul dead?
Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!"
Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: "It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!
”
”
Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)
“
Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.
When the frosty window veil
Was melted down at noon,
And the caged yellow bird
Hung over her in tune,
He marked her through the pane,
He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by,
To come again at dark.
He was a winter wind,
Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
And little of love could know.
But he sighed upon the sill,
He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
Who lay that night awake.
Perchance he half prevailed
To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
And warm stove-window light.
But the flower leaned aside
And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
A hundred miles away.
”
”
Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken and Other Poems)
“
A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil stove; she would give years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour...
Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.
”
”
Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)
“
Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya)
“
Blue must be worn for protection. Moonstones were useful in connecting with the living, topaz to contact the dead. Copper, sacred to Venus, will call a man to you, and black tourmaline will eliminate jealousy. When it came to love, you must always be careful. If you dropped something belonging to the man you loved into a candle flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, he would arrive on your doorstep by morning, so you would do well to be certain you wanted him there. The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove. It had always cost $9.99 and was therefore called Love Potion Number Nine, which worked best on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month.
”
”
Alice Hoffman (The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic, #0.2))
“
I have terrible nightmares, you know. Every night when I come home from a long day’s dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hatstand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies and still, I cannot sleep.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1))
“
Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus.
”
”
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)
“
His name was Paul Eluard, and he said this thing once: There is another world, but it is in this one...It's like, you know, inside every stove there's a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there's a grass blade, that's just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there's a tree, and inside every person there's a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there's a totally magical beautiful world. And anything you would want to know, or anything you would want to happen, all the answers are right there where you are right now. In your life.
”
”
Paul Murray (Skippy Dies)
“
Am I witch? I don't know. That's what they call me. They say it's because I follow the rhythms of the earth, honor the seasons, dance under the moon and seek the ancient herbal wisdom of our ancestors. "Folk Lore, poppycock, myths," they say as they sneer at the rosemary in my cup, the comfrey brewing on the stove and turmeric stains on my hands. "Western medicine and science have replaced all that nonsense," they say. They make witches out to be evil and then call me a witch because I am seeking the knowledge & ancient wisdom that the world seems hell bent on forgetting. Well, they can call me what they like, but I know I am not evil. This is what I know: I am an intuitive woman who instinctively knows that this sacred earth holds healing that western medicine will never be able to replace. I will be here holding space. I will be their witch. So, here I am- A kitchen witch sipping her Rosemary tea, mixing up her herbal potion, dancing under the moon, and fighting for the knowledge & wisdom of our grandmothers to not be forgotten.
”
”
Brooke Hampton
“
Kitchen solace—the feeling that a delicious meal is simmering on the kitchen stove, misting up the windows, and that at any moment your lover will sit down to dinner with you and, between mouthfuls, gaze happily into your eyes. (Also known as living.)” RECIPES THE CUISINE of Provence is as diverse as its scenery: fish by the coast, vegetables in the countryside, and in the mountains lamb and a variety of staple dishes containing pulses. One region’s cooking is influenced by olive oil, another’s is based on wine, and pasta dishes are common along the Italian border. East kisses West in Marseilles with hints of mint, saffron and cumin, and the Vaucluse is a paradise for truffle and confectionery lovers. Yet
”
”
Nina George (The Little Paris Bookshop)
“
Forest air is the epitome of healthy air. People who want to take a deep breath of fresh air or engage in physical activity in a particularly agreeable atmosphere step out into the forest. There's every reason to do so. The air truly is considerably cleaner under the trees, because the trees act as huge air filters. Their leaves and needles hang in a steady breeze, catching large and small particles as they float by. Per year and square mile this can amount to 20,000 tons of material. Trees trap so much because their canopy presents such a large surface area. In comparison with a meadow of a similar size, the surface area of the forest is hundreds of times larger, mostly because of the size difference between trees and grass. The filtered particles contain not only pollutants such as soot but also pollen and dust blown up from the ground. It is the filtered particles from human activity, however, that are particularly harmful. Acids, toxic hydrocarbons, and nitrogen compounds accumulate in the trees like fat in the filter of an exhaust fan above a kitchen stove. But not only do trees filter materials out of the air, they also pump substances into it. They exchange scent-mails and, of course, pump out phytoncides, both of which I have already mentioned.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note.
”
”
Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems)
“
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl--not Frances, not anyone I've ever known--and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me--that one about being chartless--and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me--that one about the little lamb that made thee--and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (A Boy in France (Babe Gladwaller, #2))
“
My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, “MANIFEST.” The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be -- if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being.
But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it.
Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.
Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.
”
”
Emmy Laybourne
“
As a little girl, a woman is groomed to become a wife and a mother. She is trained to always make wise decisions, yet there will forever be limits and boundaries. As I look back, I remember being told what I could and could not do, simply because I was a girl.
A little girl is told she cannot act like a boy; if she does, she will be classified as a “tomboy”. Climbing trees was prohibited, instead, she was taught to put a baby doll in a stroller and take the doll for a walk. She couldn’t sit as she pleased; she was told to only sit with her ankles crossed.
Girls were given a kitchen playset that was equipped with a stove, sink, and an accessory set of play food dishes, pots, and pans, etc., along with a tea set to bring out the “elegance” in them. As the saying goes, “Girls are sugar and spice, and everything nice.”
I’m taken aback by how girls are groomed to be a certain way; however, boys are able to love life and live freely without limitations and criticism.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
“
But the kitchen will not come into its own again until it ceases to be a status symbol and becomes again a workshop. It may be pastel. It may be ginghamed as to curtains and shining with copper like a picture in a woman's magazine. But you and I will know it chiefly by its fragrances and its clutter. At the back of the stove will sit a soup kettle, gently bubbling, one into which every day are popped leftover bones and vegetables to make stock for sauces or soup for the family. Carrots and leeks will sprawl on counters, greens in a basket. There will be something sweet-smelling twirling in a bowl and something savory baking in the oven. Cabinet doors will gape ajar and colored surfaces are likely to be littered with salt and pepper and flour and herbs and cheesecloth and pot holders and long-handled forks. It won't be neat. It won't even look efficient. but when you enter it you will feel the pulse of life throbbing from every corner. The heart of the home will have begun once again to beat.
”
”
Phyllis McGinley
“
You get a tattoo like this and a ’do like this, and wear a shirt where the tattoo shows, and you walk into a room of people and feel the animosity, the disapproval, the how-dare-you. You can feel it coming off them like heat off a stove. And the thing I want to ask them is, how have I deserved this, what have I done that so offends you? I have not asked you to cut your hair this way. I have not asked you what you thought of it, or to approve it. So why do you feel this way towards me? If you can’t get past my 'too—my tattoo—and my 'do—the way I got my hair cut—it’s only because you have decided there are certain things that can be done with hair and certain things that cannot be done with hair. And certain of them are right and proper and decent, and the rest indicate a warped, degenerate nature; therefore I am warped and degenerate. 'Cause I got my hair cut a different way, man? You gonna really live your life like that? What’s wrong with you?
”
”
Harry Crews (Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews)
“
The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking."
-- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.
So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.
”
”
Gary Snyder (The Practice of the Wild)
“
She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her.
It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche' department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the auffe-eua machine, the brass box with teeth of gas
burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone (like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my; shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around
idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
”
”
Saul Bellow (All Marbles Accounted for)
“
Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
”
”
William Maxwell (So Long, See You Tomorrow)
“
it turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion... ...A traditional aural-only conversation.. ...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exagerrated-facial-expression type of conversation with peoople right there in the room with you, all while seemingg to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.
”
”
David Foster Wallace
“
I want gifts and Christmas music. I don’t care how many Draziri are out there. They won’t take Christmas from me.”
“Yes, but we don’t have a suitable male,” Orro said. “And only one dog.”
I looked at him.
“What is this Christmas?” Wing asked.
Orro turned from the stove. “It’s the rite of passage during which the young males of the human species learn to display aggression and use weapons.”
Sean stopped what he was doing and looked at Orro.
“The young men go out in small packs,” Orro continued. “They brave the cold and come into conflict with other packs and they have to prove their dominance through physical combat. Their fathers teach them lessons in the proper use of swear words, and the young men have to undergo tests of endurance, like holding soap in their mouths and licking cold metal objects.”
Sean made a strangled noise.
“At the end of their trials, they go to see a wise elder in a red suit to prove their worth. If they are judged worthy, the family erects a ceremonial tree and presents them with gifts of weapons.”
Sean was clearly struggling, because his head was shaking.
“Also,” Orro added, “a sacrificial poultry is prepared and then given to the wild animals, probably to appease the nature spirits.”
Sean roared with laughter.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (One Fell Sweep (Innkeeper Chronicles, #3))
“
I am here because of a certain man. I came to retrace his steps. Perhaps to see if there were not some alternate course. What was here to be found was not a thing. Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. That tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.
The cats shifted and stirred, the fire creaked in the stove. Outside in the abandoned village the profoundest silence.
What is the story? the boy said.
In the town of Caborca on the Altar River there was a man who lived there who was an old man. He was born in Caborca and in Caborca he died. Yet he lived once in this town, in Huisiachepic.
What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet they are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is a hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seems are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale had no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2))
“
One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling.
Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home.
Silver and blue, blue and silver.
Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears.
The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be.
Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.
“Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass.
The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon.
Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”
Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it?
The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass.
Why doesn’t the wind move the light?
Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand.
“Stop,” he calls.
“Halt,” he calls.
But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" -- a scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind.
But she -- who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piteously "Citizen Chief! Please forgive me! I won't do it again."
The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer.
This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building.
Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head.
It had been warm during the day, when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and escaped.
The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm.
A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for whole month, because of her escape.
And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip -- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!"
But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!"
The jailer had overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM.
She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: "Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it any more!"
But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: "All right, idiot! Come on it!" The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work.
Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life!
Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world will read about you.
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))