Sunny Afternoon Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sunny Afternoon. Here they are! All 100 of them:

As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
Tigerkit was nagging his mother. "Why can't I go out?" "You've just come in." "But it's a sunny day." "You need a nap." "I'm not tired." "You will be later." "I'll sleep then." "But you'll be grumpy all afternoon if you don't nap now." "No, I won't." "Yes, you will.
Erin Hunter (Bluestar's Prophecy (Warriors Super Edition, #2))
His smile was like a Dylan album and a cup of coffee on a sunny afternoon
Jen Archer Wood (Point Pleasant)
Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.
Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth)
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny…seconds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly…
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafés and restaurants, in bars, on the Internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I'm Starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted, when my shin hurts, when it's raining, when it's sunny, on national holidays, after or before 2 A.M.). I heard it in the hospital, that terrible ironic whine from the chapped lips of women starving to death, But I'm not hun-greeee. To hear women tell it, we're never hungry. We live on little Ms. Pac-Man power pellets. Food makes us queasy, food makes us itchy, food is too messy, all I really like to eat is celery. To hear women tell it we're ethereal beings who eat with the greatest distaste, scraping scraps of food between our teeth with our upper lips curled. For your edification, it's bullshit.
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.
Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper's Daughter)
At the front door I see Tommy, a dark, unhappy shape in the middle of the sunny afternoon. We match, I think. But we don’t go together.
Amanda Maciel (Tease)
Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I shall recall the memory of warm, sunny, late summer afternoons like this one, and be comforted greatly.
Peggy Toney Horton
What, then, is a desire? We may begin by stating what it is not. A desire is not a whim. It is not an idle wish concocted on a sunny afternoon. A desire is a profundity of want, a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied.
Veronica Roth (Chosen Ones (The Chosen Ones, #1))
Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.
George Eliot (Adam Bede)
Spend sunny afternoons writing. Take weekends in the country. Dream. Drink good wine, eat fabulous cheese and great bread. Make the kind of love that destroys the bed.
Rachel Hauck (The Writing Desk)
I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
Men don't understand. Just remember that. They don't. I mean, they might have a fine understanding of how a carburetor works or how a human brain is wired, but ask them to understand your sadnesson a sunny afternoon and their brain starts doing push-ups.
Mohammed Hanif (Our Lady of Alice Bhatti)
You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books.
Matt Haig (How to Stop Time)
Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .
Matt Haig (How to Stop Time)
I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
But I had heeded the warning, and as is said of juries who have heard inadmissible evidence before it is stricken from the record, suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more. […] I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda’s superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening. When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he’d soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take route there. Not even birds would fly over it. What had created such a wasteland inside Ayumi, only she herself knew. No, maybe not even Ayumi knew the true cause. But one of the biggest factors had to be twisted sexual desires that men around Ayumi had forced upon her. As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create the sunny personality that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
It's a beautiful afternoon. Mid-sixties, sunny and clear. It reminds me of my childhood. Of pumpkins and piles of leaves and trick-or-treating.
Riley Sager (Lock Every Door)
I want to tell you a story. I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk she's pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking. They don't find the ground. The hanging branch isn't strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she's white.
John Grisham (A Time to Kill (Jake Brigance, #1))
I don't want your apology, least of all for being afraid," he said. "Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on our hocks." "What do you want, then?" Eddie cried. "You've taken everything else- everything I have to give! No, not even that, because in the end, I gave it to you! So what else do you want from me?" Roland held the key which was their half of Jake Chamber's salvation locked in his fist and said nothing. His eyes held Eddie's, and the sun shone on the green expanse of plain and the blue-gray reach of the Send River, and somewhere in the distance the crow hailed again across the golden leagues of this fading summer afternoon. After awhile, understanding began to dawn in Eddie Dean's eyes. Roland nodded. "I have forgotten the face. . ." Eddie paused. Dipped his head. Swallowed. Looked up at the Gunslinger once more. The thing which had been dying among them had moved on now- Roland knew it. That thing was gone. Just like that. Here, on this sunny wind-swept ridge at the edge of everything, it had gone forever. "I have forgotten the face of my father, gunslinger. . . and I cry your pardon." Roland opened his hand and returned the small burden of the key to him who ka had decreed must carry it. "Speak not so, gunslinger," he said in the High Speech. "Your father sees you very well. . . loves you very well . . . and so do I." Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his face. "Let's go," he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which streched beyond.
Stephen King
You will write because it is who you are. You will write on sunny mornings and rainy afternoons, in coffee shops and on street corners. You will write thousands of words that may never be read, but you will write them anyways. We write.
Kellie McGann
I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.
Bridget Asher (The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted)
One sunny afternoon, a hansom drove at great speed along Belsize Avenue, St. John’s Wood, and stopped before a large mansion.
George Bernard Shaw (The Works of George Bernard Shaw)
He loved nothing more than a dimly lit bar on a sunny afternoon.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (The Nest)
A rainy day comes as a relief. Rain is your pass to stay inside, to retreat. It's cozy and safe, hanging out on this side of the gray. But then the sun comes out in the afternoon, and there's disappointment, even fear, because the world will now resume, and it expects your participation. People will get dressed and leave their houses and go places and do things. Stepping out into the big, whirling, jarringly sunny world--a world that just a few minutes ago was so confined and still and soft and understated, and refreshingly gloomy--seems overwhelming.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life)
I wished I were like those soldiers in films who run out of bullets and toss away their guns as though they would never again have any use for them, or like runaways in the desert who, rather than ration the water in the gourd, yield to thirst and swill away, then drop their gourd in their tracks. Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda's superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening. When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he'd soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…exactly the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth. Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.
G.S. Jennsen (Vertigo (Aurora Rhapsody, #2))
We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke.
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead....Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.
Stewart O'Nan (Emily, Alone (Emily Maxwell, #2))
For the first time since she met him, she asked herself whether mr Dodgson was really the sunny personality she had at first imagined. Did she honestly want to spend the rest of her life with him, setting up home in a bathing machine, and living on what she could catch in a shrimp net? She pulled a face, stood up, brushed her frock. She was only eight, she told herself. As Jessie Fowler had pointed out this afternoon, a girl of eight needn't say yes to the first man who says he loves his love with a D. 'Panic about spinsterhood when you are ten and a half', said the worldly Jessie. 'But really, not before'.
Lynne Truss (Tennyson's Gift: Stories from the Lynne Truss Omnibus, Book 2)
Summer in England   THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar’s tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman’s skull, and so on.
Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
The day was typical of early September, sunny and crisp in the morning, hot by afternoon.
Michael Punke (The Revenant)
It was a warm and sunny afternoon. Fresh breeze was combing the soughing reeds over the river. Some of our tourists began unpacking foods and preparing snacks; others went up the hills raiding the local thickets of thorny, wild blackberry shrubs, picking the sourly-sweet berries and greedily eating them, like they haven’t eaten anything for at least a week.
Sahara Sanders (Gods’ Food (Indigo Diaries, #1))
Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts--it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857), the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators, and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and nonchalant, as darkness always was.
Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)
As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of “sex” to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream—it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it’s still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.
Emily Gould (And the Heart Says Whatever)
Come on, who wouldn’t be nervous about seeing her first love? Who wouldn’t want her old boyfriend to find her attractive? If you don’t want that, you don’t go to high school reunions, you don’t go to the thirty-fifth commemoration of the worst year of your life. Besides, she’s not fifteen anymore. She’s not that girl whose heart was broken on a sunny afternoon in May. She’s a woman, married
Judy Blume (In the Unlikely Event)
Why can’t I go out?” “You’ve just come in.” “But it’s a sunny day.” “You need a nap.” “I’m not tired.” “You will be later.” “I’ll sleep then.” “But you’ll be grumpy all afternoon if you don’t nap now.” “No, I won’t.” “Yes, you will.
Erin Hunter (Bluestar's Prophecy (Warriors Super Edition, #2))
If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed.
Abigail Thomas (A Three Dog Life: A Memoir)
They did not hop, even though the man had asked them to "hop in," because hopping is something done in the cheerful moments of one's life. A plumber might hop, for instance, if she finally fixed a particularly difficult leak in someone's shower. A sculptor would hop if his sculpture of four basset hounds playing cards was finally finished. And I would hop like nobody has ever hopped before, if I could somehow go back to that terrible Thursday, and stop Beatrice from attending that afternoon tea where she met Esmé Squalor for the first time. But Violet, Klaus and Sunny did not hop, because they were not plumbers fixing leaks, or sculptors finishing works of art, or authors magically erasing a series of unfortunate events.
Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #8))
A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area. Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between. A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights.
Johnson Rizzo
Mr. Severin smiled, tiny constellations of reflected chandelier lights glinting in his eyes. "Since I've told you about my tastes... what are yours?" Cassandra looked down at her folded hands in her lap. "I like trivial things, mostly," she said with a self-deprecating laugh. "Handiwork, such as embroidery, knitting, and needlepoint. I sketch and paint a little. I like naps and teatime, and taking a lazy stroll on a sunny day, and reading books on a rainy afternoon. But I would like two have my own family someday, and... I want to help other people far more than I'm able to now. I take baskets of food and medicine to tenants and acquaintances in the village, but that's not enough. I want to provide real help to people who need it." She sighed shortly. "I suppose that's not very interesting. Pandora's the exciting, amusing twin, the one people remember. I've always been... well, the one who's not Pandora.
Lisa Kleypas (Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6))
He had, it took me a while to realize, four personalities depending on which bathing suit he was wearing. Knowing which to expect gave me the illusion of a slight advantage. Red: bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered-- stay away. Yellow: sprightly, buoyant, funny, not without barbs-- don't give in too easily; might turn to red in no time. Green, which he seldom wore: acquiescent, eager to learn, eager to speak, sunny--why wasn't he always like this? Blue: the afternoon he stepped into my room from the balcony, the day he massaged my shoulder, or when he picked up my glass and placed it right next to me.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
Before we move forward, your first step should be to summon up your inner sadist. You don’t have an inner sadist? Bullshit… Everyone wants to witness a train wreck, even if they peek at it through their fingers. Actually, you will need to imagine that the train is full of children and baby pandas as it smashes into a bus teeming with elderly churchgoers on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Michael Rossi
But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain. Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.
E.L. Doctorow (City of God)
No, for some unknown reason, I feel more at home in the Italian Alps than I do in the brutal heat of Puglia. I like brisk autumns, snowy winters, rainy springs, and temperate summers. The change of seasons allows for a change in one’s wardrobe (I’m sartorially obsessed) and, most important, one’s diet. A boeuf carbonnade tastes a thousand times better in the last days of autumn than when it’s eighty degrees and the sun is shining. An Armagnac is the perfect complement to a snowy night by the fire but not to an August beach outing, just as a crisp Orvieto served with spaghetti con vongole is ideal “al fresco” on a sunny summer afternoon but not nearly as satisfying when eaten indoors on a cold winter’s night. One thing feeds the other. (Pun intended.) So a visit to Iceland to escape the gloom of what is known in London as “winter” was an exciting prospect. However, my greatest concern, as you can probably guess, if you’re still reading this, was the food.
Stanley Tucci (Taste: My Life Through Food)
Cork leaned against the fence. The afternoon was sunny and warm. He wrapped his hands around the top rail and felt all the heat the black iron had absorbed. It was from the sun, of course, but he knew it could just as well have come from the fire of the collective anger contained in the burial ground. So much death dealt out so unfairly, betrayal in every form—hunger, disease, outright murder. His grandmother’s people were interred here, and their blood ran hot in his veins. Still, he was
William Kent Krueger (Red Knife (Cork O'Connor, #8))
Sirius Sojourn by Stewart Stafford Cottage in an aromatic meadow, Summer's languid haze hanging, The old windmill's sundial stilled, Chirping birds and insect drones. Flowing brooks at a funereal pace, A bloated lull duels exiguous energy, Thick air's blanketing somnolence, Liquid refreshment soothes inertia. Salmon sundown slithers to a siesta, In a clear purple sky nodding assent, The intense day imperceptibly eased, As the night's humid embrace begins. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
None of them know, Aomame thought. But I know. Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. What had created such a wasteland inside Ayumi, only she herself knew. No, maybe not even Ayumi knew the true cause. But one of the biggest factors had to be the twisted sexual desires that the men around Ayumi had forced upon her. As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create the sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically—on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (Vintage International))
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Loeser's favourite book in Blimk's shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the notion that it was possible to seduce a woman just by following a rigorous system of instructions. The problem was, there wasn't much in it that he felt he could put to practical use. 'Want to impress a dame with morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she's still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That's one of every type of egg on a tray: a soft-boiled egg, a hard-boiled egg, an egg over easy, an egg sunny side up, a poached egg, a devilled egg, a pickled egg, a coddled egg, a scrambled egg, a one-egg omelette, and a shot of egg nog for the hangover. No dame will be able to believe you know so many ways to cook eggs. Egg protein is good for the manly function, and after you've pulled off the Egg Majestique, you'll probably need it, if you know what I mean.' This sounded pretty authoritative to Loeser but he just wasn't quite sure.
Ned Beauman (The Teleportation Accident)
5-4-10 Tuesday 8:00 A.M. Made a large batch of chili and spaghetti to freeze yesterday. And some walnut fudge! Relieved the electricity is still on. It’s another beautiful sunny day with fluffy white clouds drifting by. The last cloud bank looked like a dog with nursing pups. I open the window and let in some fresh air filled with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and flowering lilacs. Feels like it’s close to 70 degrees. There’s a boy on a skate board being pulled along by his St. Bernard, who keeps turning around to see if his young friend is still on board. I’m thinking of a scene still vividly displayed in my memory. I was nine years old. I cut through the country club on my way home from school and followed a narrow stream, sucking on a jawbreaker from Ben Franklins, and I had some cherry and strawberry pixie straws, and banana and vanilla taffy inside my coat pocket. The temperature was in the fifties so it almost felt like spring. There were still large patches of snow on the fairways in the shadows and the ground was soggy from the melt off. Enthralled with the multi-layers of ice, thin sheets and tiny ice sickles gleaming under the afternoon sun, dripping, streaming into the pristine water below, running over the ribbons of green grass, forming miniature rapids and gently flowing rippling waves and all the reflections of a crystal cathedral, merging with the hidden world of a child. Seemingly endless natural sculptures. Then the hollow percussion sounds of the ice thudding, crackling under my feet, breaking off little ice flows carried away into a snow-covered cavern and out the other side of the tunnel. And I followed it all the way to bridge under Maple Road as if I didn't have a care in the world.
Andrew Neff (The Mind Game Company: The Players)
Knowing yourself as the presence, the power that creates and moves worlds - This is Abundance. It exists in your open heart, your willingness to hold a space, to allow everything to unfold, to be. It feels like freshness of a morning and of the afternoon breeze. Like the sun warming your face. Abundance is meeting others in the sunny field of honesty and vulnerability. It is feeling like you are always Home - in yourself - no matter what happens. Abundance is simplicity. It is kindness. It is you, before every sunrise: fresh, open, and awake. You are rich, friend! You are rich!
Jeff Foster
It was the afternoon of an April day in that same year, and the sky was blue above, with little sailing white clouds catching the pleasant sunlight. The earth in that northern country had scarcely yet put on her robe of green. The few trees grew near brooks running down from the moors and the higher ground. The air was full of pleasant sounds prophesying of the coming summer. The rush, and murmur, and tinkle of the hidden watercourses; the song of the lark poised high up in the sunny air; the bleat of the lambs calling to their mothers—everything inanimate was full of hope and gladness.
Elizabeth Gaskell (Sylvia's Lovers)
The day we were all allowed to bring our pets into the classroom was going to be special. It was a nice sunny morning and Batty my black mouse had been spruced up for the occasion. He was in his new second-hand plastic cage, it was mustard coloured, had the mandatory wheel and sleeping chamber but had previously been a torture chamber for my cousin's late hamster. Despite my best efforts to revitalise it the wire remained rusty in places but at least it was more secure than the wooden enclosure my father had made... and Batty had instantly, and repeatedly, chewed his way out of. Sadly the species list for the class was a meagre four: rabbit, hamster, guinea pig and... one domesticated house mouse, Batty. They all ignored him, they cooed over the 'bunnies' and those chubby-fat tailless things whose eyes bulged when you squeezed them a bit, and queued to offer carrot and cabbage to those cow-licked multicoloured freaks with scratchy claws, but not one of the kids wanted to see, let alone hold, my mouse. By mid-afternoon the teacher finally caught sight of the lonely boy whispering into his mouse cage in the corner and gingerly agreed to let the rodent walk onto her hand in front of the class. Batty promptly pissed and then pooed three perfect wet little pellets, the classroom erupted with a huge collective 'urrgh' and then a frenzy of giggling, she practically threw him back in his cage and then made a big deal about washing her hands. With soap. Then we were all meant to wash our hands, with soap, but I didn't and no one noticed.
Chris Packham (Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir)
At three o'clock in the afternoon, all the fashionable world at Nice may be seen on the Promenade des Anglais—a charming place, for the wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes worn, and on a sunny day the spectacle is as gay and brilliant as a carnival. Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards, ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans, all drive, sit, or saunter here, chatting over the news, and criticizing the latest celebrity who has arrived—Ristori or Dickens, Victor Emmanuel or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands.
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women #1))
It is a sunny fall afternoon and I’m engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—picking chestnuts. I’m playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I’m holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me.
Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language)
Listening to him, Beatrice experienced the afternoon all over again, but this time there was no real danger. There was a boy who'd had a terrific idea that went a little off the rails and a girl who was a good sport and just the kind of sidekick you'd like to have along. Beatrice heard herself laugh when Benedick described her shooting off a man's hat, but it hadn't seemed that funny when it actually happened. There was a sunniness in his words that somehow even disguised his appearance, erasing the boy shaking with exhaustion, flattening all his mercurial layers into one outfit of razzle-dazzle. But the razzle-dazzle was also real. That was the most baffling part of all. He was this, too. She let him do it, not only because she came out looking all right in his story, not a clock-throwing ruin of a girl, but also because Benedick's talking about her as if she were already one of them made her one of them. Words. What a tricky, tangled science.
McKelle George (Speak Easy, Speak Love)
Dear Lily Don't think me silly, but I forget what time you said. Are we meeting at two thirty? It's gone right from my head. Did you say Monday or Thursday? I have quite forgotten what day. Was it late lunch, or afternoon tea? Tell me, what did you say? I think I would like to do Tuesday. Let's go for a lovely lunch. Or, if you prefer we could even go early, and settle for brunch. A lovely Bistro or Cafe Bar, or maybe a country pub. I don't really mind that much, as long as we get some grub. Dear Maisie, Are you going crazy? We didn't set a date. You needed to check your diary. I think you are losing it, mate. But since you are free on Tuesday, and that day suits me fine. Could we meet, about twelve…ish? Its early I like to dine. You mentioned the pub, or Bistro, or some fancy Cafe Bar. Not sure I like the sound of that, and I'm not coming in the car. If the weather is bright and sunny, we could always dine al fresco. Failing that, we could just go get a cake and a cuppa in Tesco.
Mrs A. Perry
Rapunzel woke up to the dazzling, sparkling, gently chiming display with more cheer than anyone really should who had spent the last six thousand and approximately nine hundred days in a lonely tower. "This birthday is going to be great. I just know it!" She only really knew about birthdays because she had read about them in one of the thirty-seven books she owned: Book #3: Stories from Rome and Other Great Empires. Marc Antony apparently had splendid birthdays, and Cleopatra gave him the most cunning gifts. Anyway, they seemed like a marvelous idea, and she had adopted this time of year as her own. Had there been anyone around, they would have been amazed at the hermit's beauty. For one thing, her cheeks were surprisingly rosy for a girl who had been indoors her whole life. (This was because on sunny Wednesday and Saturday afternoons she carefully followed the window-shaped spot of sun around her room, lying down and soaking in the warm rays.) Her eyes were large and green because of parents she had never known. Her lips were usually set in an expectant smile because she was Rapunzel; good-natured, lighthearted, with a quick mind that constantly refused to be crushed by her circumstances.
Liz Braswell (What Once Was Mine)
Even after the funeral, the trips to Kensington Palace, and the consolation of friends, I still couldn’t accept Diana’s death. Then, Mr. Jeffrey Ling, the British consul general in New York, invited me to speak at the memorial service for Diana in Central Park the weekend after the funeral. I was grateful for the chance to speak about Diana in my own words and at my own pace. Pat and I rewrote my three-minute speech over and over. I practiced it several times the night before. On Sunday afternoon I visited backstage with Mr. Ling and Mayor Giuliani before the service began. The mayor was engaging and down to earth. Mr. Ling was gracious and reassuring, a true gentleman. We watched the North Meadow fill up with more than ten thousand people and were grateful to see such a big turnout on a hot, sunny day. As I sat on the stage, I grew more nervous by the minute. I delivered my heartfelt speech, trembling with emotion as I spoke about “the Diana we knew.” As I looked out at the crowded meadow, I pondered the incredible path I’d traveled, all because I’d needed a part-time nanny in London seventeen years ago. I’d enjoyed a remarkable friendship, attended the most famous ceremonies of my lifetime, dined and danced in palaces, visited with royalty--extraordinary experiences for me and my family. Now, tragically, it was all ending here, as I spoke from my heart in memory and praise of my friend Diana.
Mary Robertson (The Diana I Knew: Loving Memories of the Friendship Between an American Mother and Her Son's Nanny Who Became the Princess of Wales)
The Common Perch, _Perca flavescens_, which name describes well the gleaming, golden reflections of its scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red gills standing out in vain in the thin element, is one of the handsomest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture which wished to be restored to its native element until it had grown larger; and indeed most of this species that are caught are not half grown. In the ponds there is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches in length, while only a few larger specimens are found in the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren. I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your hands. It is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse, without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and sculling indifferently past. It rather prefers the clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much choice. It is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. So many unquestionable fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then throws away. Old Josselyn in his "New England's Rarities," published in 1672, mentions the Perch or River Partridge.
Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Writings of Henry D. Thoreau))
Young Frenchwomen walking alone on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early summer are much likelier to give their phone number to an attractive man if he carries a guitar case.
Anonymous
THE ORIGINS of this book go back to a casual lunch on the Stanford campus–Thai food eaten outdoors, a sunny and pleasant afternoon–in February 1996. Michael Cusumano, taking a break from classes at MIT’s Sloan School of Management
Anonymous
I don’t know why she broke up with me. I was always there when she needed me. Well, aside for about 3/4ths of a year that one time when she told me she was pregnant. 
This was the second time in my life that I’ve felt like I’ve found “The one.” But the first one doesn’t count, because neither could I at the time. I was two, and I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with my teddy bear, FDR. 
Things were going so splendidly before we split. Just last week we were sitting on a bench in the park on a sunny afternoon, when she put her hand on mine, turned to look at me, and said, “We should have brought some bread.” 
And now it all makes sense. Bread for the birds. At the time I thought she was asking me to marry her, so like a fool my eyes teared up and I simply said, “Yes.” I guess it is like my grand pappy said when he told my pappy, “I’d be a fool to think you didn’t raise a fool.” Well, he was right. He was a fool. Like father like son. Good thing he wasn’t my father. It’s like that saying found in the correspondences between Jarod Ora Kintz and Dora J. Arod: I’m looking at him to look at me, but he is me, so what am I, a mirror?
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
freezer and put them on the counter." "Mom! How many vegetables are there? This freezer is jammed with stuff." "Eight. There are also six desserts I'll need you to get ready later on." "Have you lost your mind! Why so many?" "I sent out questionnaires this year and for once everyone responded in a timely fashion." "Hey Karla, how about another round of beers in here? We're getting thirsty. And another plate of cookies too." Will is bellowing from the living room. His butt has been welded to that chair for hours. I don't think he realizes that Karla is right next to the knife block. If he keeps this obnoxious behavior up she might be serving his head on a plate along with the turkey. I have to say, even with a house full of deadbeats, except for Karla, there really is a nice cozy, quaint and festive atmosphere in the house this afternoon. It's sunny outside and kind of chilly. It can snow here in Virginia right before or after Christmas Day, but very rarely on the 25th. We've got a tree with twinkling colorful lights while a glowing fireplace warms the room and laughter fills the air. As for the adorable English bulldog, I'm still steamed that I'm merely an afterthought, if even that. Give it a few hours and I'll
Patrick Yearly (A Lonely Dog on Christmas)
plate of cookies too." Will is bellowing from the living room. His butt has been welded to that chair for hours. I don't think he realizes that Karla is right next to the knife block. If he keeps this obnoxious behavior up she might be serving his head on a plate along with the turkey. I have to say, even with a house full of deadbeats, except for Karla, there really is a nice cozy, quaint and festive atmosphere in the house this afternoon. It's sunny outside and kind of chilly. It can snow here in Virginia right before or after Christmas Day, but very rarely on the 25th. We've got a tree with twinkling colorful lights while a glowing fireplace warms the room and laughter fills the air. As for the adorable English bulldog, I'm still steamed that I'm merely an afterthought, if even that. Give it a few hours and I'll give them a Christmas to remember.
Patrick Yearly (A Lonely Dog on Christmas)
on the Stanford campus–Thai food eaten outdoors, a sunny and pleasant afternoon–in February 1996. Michael Cusumano, taking a break from classes at MIT’s Sloan School of Management
Anonymous
Ian and Sarah’s new open carriage rolled through Hyde Park several days later on an unusually warm, sunny afternoon in early May, past the debutantes and their mamas eager to see and be seen and young bucks and rogues doing the same. Children played on the lawn with their nurses and governesses ever watchful
Sandy Raven (Loving Sarah (The Caversham Chronicles, #3))
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The day after two feet of snow paralyzed the eastern part of the United States, the sun shone brightly from clear blue skies and it was as if nothing had ever happened – except for the deep snow that still covered the ground. Peggy Toney Horton wrote: “This beautiful sunny afternoon reminds me of a child who misbehaved and then looked at his mother with wide eyes and declared, ‘I didn't do it!
Peggy Toney Horton
An incandescent lamp is made with a wire filament enclosed in a bulb without oxygen and glows as the filament is heated. Less than 10 percent of the electrical power into an incandescent light bulb is converted into light, and the rest is converted into heat. Lamps of this type are still used, but they are being replaced with fluorescent lights or light emitting diodes. The incandescent lamp therefore is a resistor that just happens to give out light. But what type of light? White light is measured by its color temperature in degrees Kelvin (K). Typically, when we look outside on a sunny clear day, the Sun along with the blue sky provides a color temperature of about 4,500 to 5,500 degrees Kelvin. As the sun starts to go down in the afternoon, the color temperature drops to about 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Kelvin. Finally as the sun sets, we can clearly perceive the sunlight with a yellow to red tint, which means the sun’s color temperature has dropped below 3,000 degrees Kelvin. Human eyes adapt to the color temperature for the most part from about 3,000 to 5,000 degrees Kelvin and perceive light in this range as “white,” albeit at 3,000 degrees Kelvin, it has a warm tone. A standard incandescent bulb for room lighting such as a 100 watt bulb provides light at about 2,700 degrees Kelvin, which provides warm white light. For studio or movie lighting, generally the color temperature is a bit whiter (between 3,200 and 3,500 degrees Kelvin, and sometimes up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin). Halogen lamps or white photoflood lamps provide light in this color temperature range. Incandescent lamps exceeding 4,000 degrees usually are specially made and they are often coated in blue. For standard low-power lamps such as flashlight bulbs or indicator lights, the color temperature is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Kelvin.
Ronald Quan (Electronics from the Ground Up: Learn by Hacking, Designing, and Inventing)
Tubby had taken a little time off. He had picked up some money from the Sandy Shandell case, and his current clients had no pressing problems that couldn’t be solved later, so he decided to treat himself. First he talked Raisin Partlow into driving down to Florida for a couple of weeks. Tubby rented a Lincoln Town Car with a built-in CD player, stuffed the trunk full of fishing tackle and firearms, and put an Igloo full of beer, bourbon, and orange juice in the backseat. They were on their way on the afternoon of a sunny day.
Tony Dunbar (City of Beads (Tubby Dubonnet, #2))
You will write because it is who you are. You will write on sunny mornings and rainy afternoons, in coffee shops and on street corners. You will write thousands of words that may never be read, but you will write them anyways. We write.
Jeff Goins, The Art Of Work
campus–Thai food eaten outdoors, a sunny and pleasant afternoon–in February 1996. Michael
Anonymous
Knowing yourself as the Presence - the Power which moves and creates worlds - this is ABUNDANCE. It is that which exists in your open heart. Your willingness to hold a space, to allow everything to unfold, to be. It is that which feels like freshness of a morning and of the afternoon breeze. Like the sun warming your face. Abundance is meeting others in the sunny field of honesty and vulnerability. It is feeling like you are always Home - in yourself - no matter what happens. Abundance is simplicity. It is kindness. It feels like a sunrise - fresh, open, awake. You are rich, my friend! You are rich!
Adapted from Jeff Foster
My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they, aired the other. They were rooms of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.
Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
Even a late modern hero like Steve Jobs doesn’t conform to the narrative of secularism. In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson recalls a scene near the end of Jobs’s life that exemplifies the ambiguity of our secular age: One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
James K.A. Smith (How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor)
There is a way of looking at life called “keeping things in perspective.” This simply means “making yourself feel better by comparing the things that are happening to you right now against other things that have happened at a different time, or to different people.” For instance, if you were upset about an ugly pimple on the end of your nose, you might try to feel better by keeping your pimple in perspective. You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the mirror at your ugly pimple, you could say to yourself, “Well, at least I’m not being eaten by a bear.” You can see at once why keeping things in perspective rarely works very well, because it is hard to concentrate on somebody else being eaten by a bear when you are staring at your own ugly pimple. So it was with the Baudelaire orphans in the days that followed. In the morning, when the children joined Aunt Josephine for a breakfast of orange juice and untoasted bread, Violet thought to herself, “Well, at least we’re not being forced to cook for Count Olaf’s disgusting theater troupe.” In the afternoon, when Aunt Josephine would take them to the library and teach them all about grammar, Klaus thought to himself, “Well, at least Count Olaf isn’t about to whisk us away to Peru.” And in the evening, when the children joined Aunt Josephine for a dinner of orange juice and untoasted bread, Sunny thought to herself, “Zax!” which meant something along the lines of “Well, at least there isn’t a sign of Count Olaf anywhere.” But no matter how much the three siblings compared their life with Aunt Josephine to the miserable things that had happened to them before, they couldn’t help but be dissatisfied with their circumstances. In her free time, Violet would dismantle the gears and switches from the model train set, hoping to invent something that could prepare hot food without frightening Aunt Josephine, but she couldn’t help wishing that Aunt Josephine would simply turn on the stove. Klaus would sit in one of the chairs in the library with his feet on a footstool, reading about grammar until the sun went down, but
Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #3))
When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prixed. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pari of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, west style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feelign that they were exactly my size. This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lighting might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they'd been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.
Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel)
quiet for a sunny London afternoon. He said, ‘It’s too quiet.
Louise Welsh (Death Is a Welcome Guest (Plague Times, #2))
final space shuttle flight in history lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a sunny afternoon in 2011. “Atlantis, Houston, you are go at throttle up.” Atlantis was flying like an angel. “Feel that mother go,” Jack said jubilantly. “I mean, roger, we are go at throttle up.” The gee-forces were insane! The vibration rattled the teeth in his head. Waiting for the SRBs to burn out and detach, he grinned. Nothing could prepare you for this. But he was prepared. He’d been preparing all his life. The roaring
Felix R. Savage (Freefall (Earth's Last Gambit, #1))
The number of pedestrians rose and, at slack times, many people, who had been reduced to inactivity by the closing of shops and some offices, filled the streets and cafés. For the time being they were not yet unemployed, just on leave. This meant that, for example, at three in the afternoon on a sunny day Oran gave the deceptive impression of a town on holiday, in which the traffic had been halted and the shops closed to allow a public demonstration to march past, and the inhabitants had poured out into the streets to take part in the celebrations.
Albert Camus (The Plague)
I am five, Wading out into deep Sunny grass, Unmindful of snakes & yellowjackets, out To the yellow flowers Quivering in sluggish heat. Don't mess with me 'Cause I have my Lone Ranger Six-shooter. I can hurt You with questions Like silver bullets. The tall flowers in my dreams are Big as the First State Bank, & they eat all the people Except the ones I love. They have women's names, With mouths like where Babies come from. I am five. I'll dance for you If you close your eyes. No Peeping through your fingers. I don't supposed to be This close to the tracks. One afternoon I saw What a train did to a cow. Sometimes I stand so close I can see the eyes Of men hiding in boxcars. Sometimes they wave & holler for me to get back. I laugh When trains make the dogs Howl. Their ears hurt. I also know bees Can't live without flowers. I wonder why Daddy Calls Mama honey. All the bees in the world Live in little white houses Except the ones in these flowers. All sticky & sweet inside. I wonder what death tastes like. Sometimes I toss the butterflies Back into the air. I wish I knew why The music in my head Makes me scared. But I know things I don't supposed to know. I could start walking & never stop. These yellow flowers Go on forever. Almost to Detroit. Almost to the sea. My mama says I'm a mistake. That I made her a bad girl. My playhouse is underneath Our house, & I hear people Telling each other secrets.
Yusef Komunyakaa
TTBH #3: LET THE SAINTS MARCH IN! When our kids were nine and eleven, my hubby and I took them to the Grand Canyon. I had always wanted to hike a canyon trail, so one super-hot, sunny July afternoon, we grabbed a small backpack and stuffed it with a few water bottles and a couple of apples and granola bars and then took off down a trail. The hike we wanted to take was round-trip to and from the first shelter house on the trail, about three miles total, so I wasn’t concerned. I regularly walked four to five miles a day at that time. How tough could it be?
Mary Beth Weisenburger (Praying With a Pen: The Girlfriends' Guide to Stress-Free Prayer Journaling)
The September afternoon was pleasant and sunny and she could see that Luke was crouched atop one of the cabins tearing off rotting shingles. Although it was cool enough for her to need a jacket, his broad sunburned bare back was facing her—it was a very enjoyable sight and she drank it in, silent. Then Plenty whinnied and Luke glanced over his shoulder. He stood and carefully turned toward her, balanced on the sloping roof. A smile found its way to her lips. What a sight he was, bare-chested, whiskers on his cheeks and chin, wearing jeans and a tool belt. She briefly wondered what it was about a tool belt… What was it she had said about the guy she had in mind? Clean-shaven, starched and pressed, polo shirt…? Nah…. “Looks
Robyn Carr (Temptation Ridge)
The afternoon was turning out to be sweet, lazy, and altogether enjoyable, when Ellen heard Val’s voice in her ear. “You, my love”—he kissed her neck—“are not wearing drawers.” “It’s too hot,” Ellen said, smiling at his wicked tone of voice. “Perhaps.” Val’s hand slid up her leg, hiking her dress along with it. “Perhaps it’s too hot for even the clothing you have on.” “Valentine.” Ellen opened her eyes. “It is broad, sunny daylight. Will you behave?” “Misbehaving is always more fun in broad, sunny daylight, and I’m not asking you to take your clothes off, just let me move them aside.” “Has this been your objective since you came to my room?” Ellen asked, trying to peek over her shoulder to read his expression. “Honestly?” Val met her gaze. “It became my objective the moment I first kissed you, and yes, I do mean that first kiss, a year or so ago. Lie back, Ellen.” Val’s voice dropped, and his touch became silken. “Let me pleasure you.” “You
Grace Burrowes (The Virtuoso (Duke's Obsession, #3; Windham, #3))
I laughed because he told me funny stories and it was so easy and light. I realized how long it has been since I’ve enjoyed that most simple of pleasures: company and conversation on a sunny afternoon. I am impatient for such pleasures, Katy. I am no longer a girl—I am a woman, and I want things, things that I will not have; but it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred? What
Kate Morton (The Secret Keeper)
It was the middle of the afternoon, on a sunny day in early August of 1952, when we pulled into the bus dock in Bangor, Maine, located next to the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Station. As I got off, I heard people talking about a moose that had run down the main street that morning, but I had my own problems. The Men’s Room in most bus and railroad terminals leaves a lot to be desired and this one was no exception, but now was not the time to complain. It had the usual disgusting engravings, with information on who would do what to whom, and how they could be contacted. The floor was also decorated with toilet paper, and someone forgot to flush, but my needs were urgent, and so I quickly overcame my inhibitions…. Not long after and much relieved, I emerged from the lavatory and looked around trying to get my bearings. Down the street, parked in front of a “No Parking” sign, I could see a blue school bus with “MMA” painted in white lettering above the windshield. This was my first contact with Maine Maritime Academy, the school that would shape my being for a lifetime.
Hank Bracker
To support an adequate standard of living, humankind still needs huge quantities of wood and wood products, from planking and beams and fibreboard to paper. We need trees, lots of them, and we must therefore use a good fraction of Earth’s surface as cropland for tree farms. Indeed, British Columbia’s terrain and temperate climate are ideal for growing softwood suitable for construction. I know that we can grow and harvest trees sensibly: during his career in B.C., my father worked as a forester and built a reputation as an innovator of logging and reforestation techniques that cause minimal damage to the land. As a child and young man, I spent many hours watching his employees use these techniques, and for two summers I worked in the B.C. forest industry myself, surveying tracts of timber for logging. But on that sunny afternoon, the clear-cuts southeast
Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?)
It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.
Beck Weathers (Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest)
There’s a possibility she’s been spending time over in San Ignacio, at a place called the Maybe Club.” “Ah,” said Hagopian. “Joanna’s hitting a better-class rotten and rundown dive these days. The Maybe Club is a high-class sewer.” He trotted off, still in sweatsocks and no shoes, to a new row of files. “Here. A write-up from the San Ignacio Pilot weekend section a couple months back.” He unfolded a full tabloid page and gave it to Easy. “ ‘Controversial Club’s Owner Defends Liberal Views,’ ” Easy read the headline. “Is he in politics, too?” “He thinks it’s okay to screw other peoples’ mates,” explained Hagopian. “In San Ignacio that’s a pretty liberal view.” Easy looked at the photo of the Maybe proprietor leaning against the bar in his club. “This is Sunny Boy Sadler. …” “Right, onetime singing cowboy of the B movies,” said Hagopian. “I spent many happy afternoons in the Forties with his films. Little did I realize then that Sunny Boy was usually so juiced they had to practically glue him to his horse.
Ron Goulart (The Same Lie Twice (The John Easy Mysteries))
You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind .
Matt Haig (How to Stop Time)
I often think of what Hendrich said to me, over a century ago, in his New York apartment. ‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said. ‘There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.’ I stared through the curving smoke of his cigar, out over Central Park where trees lay uprooted from the hurricane. ‘I doubt I will ever love again,’ I said. Hendrich smiled, like the devil he could be. ‘Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .
Matt Haig (How to Stop Time)
Cathedral of Light by Stewart Stafford The wintry grey forest branches, Embrace freezing fog as build, Backlit by the pushy noon sun, Revealing a cathedral of light. An air frost of transient structure, Reprieve from a hangman's bloom, Naked limbs greeted the icy cover, The looming cape of ersatz foliage. Tongues of wind scatter the pop-up, Six sheep in a straight line saw it off, A still and sunny afternoon followed, Frozen matinee fades another day. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor.
David Foster Wallace
It was sunny, with the special light of an autumn afternoon, when everything casts such dark and long shadows that the earth, and all that was standing on it, looked as if it was slipping towards the sun.
John Berger (Lilac and Flag)
At the same time that she was grateful her secret was safe, she couldn’t understand why nobody confronted her. There were so many people in her orbit and yet only two of them ever said anything. One was her friend Ingrid, and the other was Ingrid’s mother. On a sunny spring afternoon when the girls were sixteen, Ingrid and Ingrid’s mother and Sloane were all in the living room at Ingrid’s house and Ingrid’s mother said, Sloane, what is going on? You are emaciated. And Sloane made the usual excuses. She said she was eating so much and she didn’t know what was going on, that perhaps it was a high metabolism. She pretended to always be eating. She had several reliable tricks. Coming into someone else’s home, she would say she was stuffed, that she’d just eaten a burger and fries. That way no one would ask if she wanted something to eat. Faced with a plate she couldn’t avoid, she would move food around, smearing caloric sauces around the plate, mopping them up with bread that she left on the rim. She would cut food into many pieces and hold her fork in the air, so she seemed to be actively consuming. Meanwhile she would drink constantly. Bottles of water, Diet Coke, tea, coffee. She always had a drink in her hand. Her friend Ingrid would ask, Why are you drinking so many drinks? Why do you drink so much coffee, and juice, and water all the time? Why are you drinking so many freaking beverages, Sloane? The answer, the one that Sloane could not tell her best friend, was that she was starving.
Lisa Taddeo (Three Women)