The Rachel Papers Quotes

You know, I can see more than just the future or the past." "Really?" I asked, paging through through the papers in the file. "Can you also see the present? Because I can do that, too. Like, right now, I sense that I'm in a messy room with a total toolbox.

Rachel, what do you do? Put an ad in the paper for trouble? (Glenn)

I suppressed a shudder at the image. Blood is so very gross to me. If I give myself a paper cut, I nearly hyperventilate.

Al was standing a bare three feet away, his mood almost jovial as he took the paper and it vanished in a wash of black sparkles. “Thank you, Rachel,” he said, carefully reaching for my hand as Trent stiffened. “Welcome back, my itchy witch.

Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

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Sex was like Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief.

You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.

...It was painful, exceedingly painful, to know that they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a return..." The paper fell. It was a limited edition of Pride and Prejudice. "You, you gave me-" "Mr. Darcy." Wes whispered in my ear. "As you can see, I also memorized some lines so that you'd swoon.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

Hard habit to break, friendship.

In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.

You know, I can see more than just the future or the past." "Really?" I asked, paging through the papers in the file. "Can you also see the present? Because I can do that, too. Like, right now, I see that I'm in a messy room with a total toolbox.

Anything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.’” “Stupid

Books spoke mind to mind, soul to soul across the abyss of time and distance.

With the right books, we can change everything.

But hope was a malicious, jagged thing, all spikes and razors that churned and cut deep in his guts. Hope was a great deal like fear.

Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I'm sure you're now aware. Any long-term relationship is - and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It's uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

One thing you learn early growing up a girl--people always talk, whatever you do,' Glain said. 'What bliss it must be to be male.

Anyone can get a degree or a certificate in something. Big deal. A piece of paper from a university somewhere doesn't define a person. It won't tell you who I am.

The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink.

From the baking aisle to the post office line to the wrapping paper bin in the attic, women populate every dark corner of Christmas. Who got up at 4 a.m. to put the ham in the oven? A woman. . . . Who sent the Christmas card describing her eighteen-year-old son's incarceration as 'a short break before college?' A woman. Who remembered to include batteries at the bottom of each stocking? A woman. And who gets credit for pulling it all off? Santa. That's right. A man.

Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.

So I am nineteen years old and don’t usually know what I’m doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn’t mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it’s all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?

And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ... okay.

Jess." Khalila drew his gaze back to her. "What is it Scholar Wolfe used to tell us? 'Anything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.

More than anything, I wanted to help her write new words, on perfectly crisp, untouched paper, and to come up with a flawless title, for the perfect story.

I hurried out of the lobby and turned the corner into the English hall, so I didn’t see the guy in front of me until it was too late. “Oh!” I exclaimed as we bumped shoulders. “Sorry!” Then I realized who I’d bumped into, and I immediately regretted my apologetic tone. If I’d known it was David Stark, I would have tried to hit him harder, or maybe stepped on his foot with the spiky heel of my new shoes for good measure. I did my best to smile at him, though, even as I realized my stomach was jumping all over the place. He must have scared me more than I’d thought. David scowled at me over the rims of his ridiculous hipster glasses, the kind with the thick black rims. I hate those. I mean, it’s the 21st century. There are fashionable options for eyewear. “Watch where you’re going,” he said. Then his lips twisted in a smirk. “Or could you not see through all that mascara?” I would’ve loved nothing more than the tell him to kiss my ass, but one of the responsibilities of being a student leader at The Grove is being polite to everyone, even if he is a douchebag who wrote not one, but three incredibly unflattering articles in the school paper about what a crap job you’re doing as SGA president. And you especially needed to be polite to said douchebag when he happened to be the nephew of Saylor Stark, President of the Pine Grove Junior League, head of the Pine Grove Betterment Society, Chairwoman of the Grove Academy School Board, and, most importantly, Founder and Organizer of Pine Grove’s Annual Cotillion. So I forced myself to smile even bigger at David and said, “Nope, just in a hurry. Are you, uh… are you here for the dance?” He snorted. “Um, no. I’d rather slam my testicles in a locker door. I have some work to do on the paper.

As she was working out the calculations in her head, she forgot to really worry about all the physical things that were getting in the way--the balancing of the bow, the aiming, the fear she wasn't going to get it right--and suddenly it all just clicked. She felt it come into sudden, sharp focus, like a spotlight had suddenly focused on her, and she let go of the arrow. That instant, she knew it would hit the target. She let the bow rock gracefully forward on the balance point, watching the arrow, and it smacked into the exact center of her crudely drawn paper circle. Physics. She loved physics. Shane arrived just as she put the arrow into the center, and slowed down, staring from the target to Claire, standing straight and tall, bow still held loosely in one hand and ready to shoot again. "You look so hot right now," he said.

Take a look at the scaly witches round your local shopping center, many of them with children. Grim enough with their clothes on. Imagine them naked! Snatches that yo-yo between their knees, breasts so flaccid you could tie them in a knot. One would have to be literally galvanized on Spanish Fly even to consider it. Yet it gets done somehow. Look at the kids. — The teenager may be more spontaneous, doglike, etc., but it’s generally only another name on the list, only another notch on the cock.

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted. It is natural, even instinctive to prefer comfort to pain, the familiar to the unknown. But sometimes our instincts are not wise. Life usually offers us far more than our biases and preferences will allow us to have. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.

Es bedeutete: mehr Prüfungen, aber auch da muss ich sagen, ich hab ganz gerne feste Perspektiven, vorhersehbare Paniksituationen, auf die ich meine Ängste konzentrieren kann.

She'd started handcuffed, armed with a paper clip. Now she had a ten-inch strip of metal with sharp edges, handcuffs, and a paper clip. Her odds were improving all the time.

That's the thing about me. I prefer things once they're already over and I'm working on understanding them. I wish I were faster at that - like, I could understand things while they're happening - but I always have to read the whole book and write the entire paper before I even know what the hell I'm thinking.

Joe certainly didn't seem concerned with his own enlightenment, but he did seem more intelligent than the average muscle neck. Then he raised his arm, bent his head, and sniffed his pit. Gabrielle looked at the plates in her hands. She should have used paper.

Books had become a symbol of trust and libraries places of peace and stability. In all the chaos of the world that counted people as different levels of worthy, the Library served all equally. All genders, races, levels of ability. It was the one place they could all be safe

Izzy was sitting cross-legged on the couch, a paper-back book in her hands. She didn’t look up when we came in, and I wondered what she was reading that had her so absorbed. Monster Killing for Beginners, probably.

And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.

1. When you look at the papers on your desk and circle something, are you really reading from them? Don’t you read from a teleprompter? When you go to commercial, you shuffle those papers, too. Seriously, is there anything even written on them?

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it’s amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.

we're just paper on a shelf, in the end

Santi and Wolfe exchanged a look. Wolfe inclined his head a little to the side, with a strange, crooked smile. "You see? They're as bad as we are." "Worse," Santi sighed.

Don’t make the error of believing the papers know everything, and strive to know everything the papers won’t believe.

Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.

London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser.

cardboard toilet paper rolls strewn across the

And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there'd be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind's bacteria would be forming new armies. I'd come up with something to get me down... Was this the case with everyone -- everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of 'having problems' -- or 'having a harder life than most people', or 'having a harder life than you usually had' -- was spurious. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

But you’ve got to do it in the end. You have to end up with somebody. Because otherwise you go mad, or you start worrying about going mad, which is even worse. You can’t go on sleeping alone.

“Here’s my number. I almost forgot to give it to you.” I swallow as I stare at the number. Tell her. Just f*cking tell her. “Rachel...” “You’ll call, right?” And the small amount of hurt in her voice stabs my heart. I envelop Rachel in my arms and cup her head to my chest. She smells good. Like the ocean. Like her jacket. I try to memorize the feel of her body against mine: all soft and warm and curves. The paper in her hand crinkles as she links one arm, then another around my waist. Leaning into me, she lets out a contented sigh and I close my eyes with the sound. Ten seconds. I’ll keep her for ten more seconds. I want to keep her. Two. I shouldn’t. Four. Maybe she can see past what I am. We don’t have to be more. We can be friends. Seven. I can fix this. Nine. I can make anything work. Ten. “I’ll call.”

One thing I’d learned out in the world was that nobody’s so different. We all buy toilet paper, contemplate the ply. Request help at self-checkout because something always fucking goes wrong, doesn’t scan. We all spend too much money at Target, stand there in the parking lot going through the receipt, brow furrowed. We forget to take our vitamins, to take out the trash. We microwave leftovers. Set our alarms. Waste time on the internet. Forget our passwords. We worshipped gods of our choosing.

We could just chill if you want." Emma raises a brow at Rachel. Rachel shrugs her innocence. "Nuh-uh. Don't look at me. I didn't teach him that." "Picked it up all on my own," he says, retrieving his pencil from the floor. "Figures," Emma sneers. "Aww, don't hate on me, boo." "Okay, I'm drawing the line at 'boo.' And don't call me 'shorty' either," Emma says. He laughs. "That was next." "No doubt. So, did anyone explain how you chill?" Galen shrugs. "As far as I can tell, chillin' is the equivalent of being in a coma, only awake." "That's about right." "Yeah. Doesn't sound that appealing. Are all humans lazy?" "Don't push it, Highness." But she's smirking. "If I'm Highness, then you're 'boo.' Period." Emma growls, but it doesn't sound as fierce as she intends. In fact, it's adorable. "Jeez! I won't call you Majesty either. And you Will. Not. Ever Call me 'boo' again." His grin feels like it reaches all the way to his ears as he nods. "Did...did I just win an argument?" She rolls her eyes. "Don't be stupid. We tied." He laughs. "If you say I won, I'll let you open your present." She glances at the gift bag and bites her lip-also adorable. She looks back at him. "Maybe I don't care about the present." "Oh, you definitely care," he says, confident. "No. I definitely do NOT," she says, crossing her arms. He runs a hand through his hair. If she makes it any more difficult, he'll have to tell her where they're going. He gives his best nonchalant shrug. "That changes everything. I just figured since you like history...Anyway, just forget it. I won't bother you about it anymore." He stands and walks over to the bag, fingering the polka-dot tissue paper Rachel engorged it with. "Even if I say you win, it's still a lie, you know." Emma huffs. Galen won't take the bait. Not today. "Fine. It's a lie. I just want to hear you say it." With an expression mixing surprise and suspicion in equal parts, she says it. And it sounds so sweet coming from those lips. "You won.

As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more?

Dario, What you do or do not want applies to you, not me. I didn't ask your permission, and I don't seek your approval!' Khalia's voice had taken on a hard edge, and Dario was the first to look away. 'Congratulations,' Glain said 'You're both wildly independent, and now the Archivist has to be wondering why both of you would want to get close to him at the same time. Clearly, neither of you are cut out to be spies.

You ease a record from its cover. It's years since you've held one but you do this without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell.

I grew up poor among poor people in a poor town, but I never knew how poor I'd been until I moved to New York. These women with their fresh produce and diamonds and manicures. Even their skin was expensive. What got to me about them wasn't just the way they made me suddenly self-conscious about the ink under my fingernails or the haircut I gave myself in my own bathroom. It wasn't just that they'd spend more in one evening on chocolate, escarole, and jam than I did on the rice and beans and film and photo paper I needed for a week. What enraged me is that they didn't, couldn't, see me. I was less than a machine to them, less than a body. I did not even appear in their line of sight. I was nothing more than a couple of chanted phrases: Cash or charge? Paper or plastic? Thank you, have a nice night.

I was living my entire life waiting for a moment to be special enough for me to look, feel and act my best, and the truth is, you don't need a special moment, or any reason at all, to do that. If not now, then when? This saying became my mantra and the answer to a dozen different questions. Should we eat off the nice wedding china or paper plates? Should I dress up for a date with my husband or just wear jeans again? Bake some cookies for the neighbors? The answers to all of these questions is the same: If not now, then when? You could spend forever planning out your someday when right now, today, this second, this is all you've got. Someday isn't guaranteed!

Goliath fell to a slingshot and a stone. and the Library is a lumbering giant, dying of its own arrogance; it has to change or fall. We have the tools. The will. The knowledge.

Because revolution rarely comes from those in charge.

toilet-papered your house!

Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate.

One thing you learn early growing up a girl—people always talk, whatever you do,” Glain said.

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in Hell’s despair.

Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.

To the scholars. To the students. To the librarians. To those who fight for all of those every day. Shine the light.

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.” —J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN Epitaph on the grave of Rachel Lynne Barrett, Greenwood Cemetery, Weatherford,

Is that true?” I asked Dad. “Are they gone for good?” Dad shifted in his seat, uneasy. “Not necessarily. But Sophie, the risk involved in bringing them back…It’s almost too great to fathom.” “I can fathom all kinds of things,” I told him. “Try me.” I think I might have seen pride in Dad’s eyes. Or maybe it was just a gleam of Why is my offspring so insane? Still, he answered me. “If you destroy both the ritual and the witch or warlock who used it, the spell itself can be reversed.” I shrugged. “That doesn’t sound so hard.” “I wasn’t finished. They must be destroyed simultaneously.” Swallowing, I tried to sound cheerful. “Again, not so bad. Get Lara to hold the piece of paper, zap them both with, um, some fire or something, and bam! Instant demon reversal.” “And they must be destroyed in the pit where the demons were raised,” Dad continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. Seriously, he had to stop doing that. “Oh, and as the piece de resistance, you’ll need to do a spell to close the pit itself, with both the ritual and the witch inside it. And that’s such an intense ritual that it could actually pull whatever’s around the pit into it as well.” “Like, the person doing the spell?” “Like, the whole damn island the put is on.” “Oh. Okay. Well, that is definitely…challenging. But not impossible. And we have the grimoire, that’s one bonus, right? Even if the demon-raising ritual isn’t in it.” “Sophie Alice Mercer,” Mom said warningly, just as Dad said, “Atherton,” and Aislinn said, “Brannick.” I threw my hands up. “Look, it doesn’t matter what you call me. I’ll hyphenate, how about that?

Alchemy is a science, but a science that acknowledges certain principles of magic. This. . . this is a mathematical expression of quintessence, Archimedes' fifth element, which binds all things together.

Of course, there were no paper towels to clean up with…just hand dryers. I rubbed my wet fingers over the ice cream, creating a big wet spot right in the center of my chest. Oh, yeah, beauty and poise contest, here I come.

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own. But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away.

My personal life was like a storybook run through the paper shredder. All of my early chapters blown to bits, with nothing to show for where I’d been and what I’d done. With empty pages behind me, it was time for me to write my own future.

...a hatred so strong not even love could overcome it. The line between the two is paper thin and razor sharp, and we ended up on the wrong side of it. Maybe it was always inevitable, but if that were true, it wouldn't feel like losing something.

But now he realizes that all any of these documents are is words, and not even very mysterious words. Words like 'free' and 'rights' and 'liberty'. How can it be that so few words, scratched on a piece of letter paper, are what’s separating Sara and him from a life of freedom?

You know, we still have like, half an hour down here. Seems a shame to waste it.” I poked him in the ribs, and he gave an exaggerated wince. “No way, dude. My days of cellar, mill, and dungeon lovin’ are over. Go castle or go home.” “Fair enough,” he said as we interlaced our fingers and headed for the stairs. “But does it have to be a real castle, or would one of those inflatable bouncy things work?” I laughed. “Oh, inflatable castles are totally out of-“ I skidded to a stop on the first step, causing Archer to bump into me. “What the heck is that?” I asked, pointing to a dark stain in the nearest corner. “Okay, number one question you don’t want to hear in a creepy cellar,” Archer sad, but I ignored him and stepped off the staircase. The stain bled out from underneath the stone wall, covering maybe a foot of the dirt floor. It looked black and vaguely…sticky. I swallowed my disgust as I knelt down and gingerly touched the blob with one finger. Archer crouched down next to me and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a lighter, and after a few tries, a wavering flame sprung up. We studied my fingertip in the dim glow. “So that’s-“ “It’s blood, yeah,” I said, not taking my eyes off my hand. “Scary.” “I was gonna go with vile, but scary works.” Archer fished in his pockets again, and this time he produced a paper napkin. I took it from him and gave Lady Macbeth a run for her money in the hand-scrubbing department. But even as I attempted to remove a layer of skin from my finger, something was bugging me. I mean, something other than the fact that I’d just touched a puddle of blood. “Check the other corners,” I told Archer. He stood up and moved across the room. I stayed where I was, trying to remember that afternoon Dad and I had sat with the Thorne family grimoire. We’d looked at dozens of spells, but there had been one- “There’s blood in every corner,” Archer called from the other side of the cellar. “Or at least that’s what I’m guessing it is. Unlike some people, I don’t have the urge to go sticking my fingers in it.

The list of correlations to that night is as long as the Jersey coast. And so is the list of reasons I shouldn't be looking forward to seeing him at school. But I can't help it. He's already texted me three times this morning: Can I pick you up for school? and Do u want 2 have breakfast? and R u getting my texts? My thumbs want to answer "yes" to all of the above, but my dignity demands that I don't answer at all. He called my his student. He stood there alone with me on the beach and told me he thinks of me as a pupil. That our relationship is platonic. And everyone knows what platonic means-rejected. Well, I might be his student, but I'm about to school, him on a few things. The first lesson of the day is Silent Treatment 101. So when I see him in the hall, I give him a polite nod and brush right by him. The zap from the slight contact never quite fades, which mean he's following me. I make it to my locker before his hand is on my arm. "Emma." The way he whispers my name sends goose bumps all the way to my baby toes. But I'm still in control. I nod to him, dial the combination to my locker, then open it in his face. He moves back before contact. Stepping around me, he leans his hand against the locker door and turns me around to face him. "That's not very nice." I raise my best you-started-this brow. He sighs. "I guess that means you didn't miss me." There are so many things I could pop off right now. Things like, "But at least I had Toraf to keep my company" or "You were gone?" Or "Don't feel bad, I didn't miss my calculus teacher either." But the goal is to say nothing. So I turn around. I transfer books and papers between my locker and backpack. As I stab a pencil into my updo, his breath pushes against my earlobe when he chuckles. "So your phone's not broken; you just didn't respond to my texts." Since rolling my eyes doesn't make a sound, it's still within the boundaries of Silent Treatment 101. So I do this while I shut my locker. As I push past him, he grabs my arm. And I figure if stomping on his toe doesn't make a sound... "My grandmother's dying," he blurts. Commence with the catching-Emma-off-guard crap. How can I continue Silent Treatment 101 after that? He never mentioned his grandmother before, but then again, I never mentioned mine either. "I'm sorry, Galen." I put my hand on his, give it a gentle squeeze. He laughs. Complete jackass. "Conveniently, she lives in a condo in Destin and her dying request is to meet you. Rachel called your mom. We're flying out Saturday afternoon, coming back Sunday night. I already called Dr. Milligan." "Un-freaking-believable.

Rachel came carefully downstairs one morning, in a dressing gown that wasn't quite clean, and stood at the brink of the living room as though preparing to make an announcement. She looked around at each member of the double household - at Evan, who was soberly opening the morning paper, at Phil, who'd been home from Costello's for hours but hadn't felt like sleeping yet, and at her mother, who was setting the table for breakfast - and then she came out with it. "I love everybody," she said, stepping into the room with an uncertain smile. And her declaration might have had the generally soothing effect she'd intended if her mother hadn't picked it up and exploited it for all the sentimental weight it would bear. "Oh Rachel," she cried, "What a sweet, lovely thing to say!" and she turned to address Evan and Phil as if both of them might be too crass or numbskulled to appreciate it by themselves. "Isn't that a wonderful thing for this girl to say, on a perfectly ordinary Friday morning? Rachel, I think you've put us all to shame for our petty bickering and our selfish little silences, and it's something I'll never forget. You really do have a marvelous wife, Evan, and I have a marvelous daughter. Oh, and Rachel, you can be sure that everybody in this house loves you, too, and we're all tremendously glad to have you feeling so well." Rachel's embarrassment was now so intense that it seemed almost to prevent her from taking her place at the table; she tried two quick, apologetic looks at her husband and her brother, but they both missed the message in her eyes. And Gloria wasn't yet quite finished. "I honestly believe that was a moment we'll remember all our lives," she said. "Little Rachel coming downstairs - or little big Rachel, rather - and saying 'I love everybody.' You know what I wish though Evan? I only wish your father could've been here this morning to share it with us." But by then even Gloria seemed to sense that the thing had been carried far enough. As soon as she'd stopped talking the four of them took their breakfast in a hunched and businesslike silence, until Phil mumbled "Excuse me" and shoved back his chair. "Where do you think you're going, young man?" Gloria inquired. "I don't think you'd better go anywhere until you finish up all of that egg.

My fingers felt awkward. They weren't used to moving in these ways. They weren't used to making creases and folding with precision. My eyes had to adjust as well, because they naturally gravitated to the painful words that I knew were on these pieces of paper. Forget about my heart; you know how I said this was a Lenten practice: It's called a practice because it's an act of training, a discipline to do something you're not naturally inclined to do.

Asking a writer why they like to write {in the theoretical sense of the question} is like asking a person why they breathe. For me, writing is a natural reflex to the beauty, the events, and the people I see around me. As Anais Nin put it, "We write to taste life twice." I live and then I write. The one transfers to the other, for me, in a gentle, necessary way. As prosaic as it sounds, I believe I process by writing. Part of the way I deal with stressful situations, catty people, or great joy or great trials in my own life is by conjuring it onto paper in some way; a journal entry, a blog post, my writing notebook, or my latest story. While I am a fair conversationalist, my real forte is expressing myself in words on paper. If I leave it all chasing round my head like rabbits in a warren, I'm apt to become a bug-bear to live with and my family would not thank me. Some people need counselors. Some people need long, drawn-out phone-calls with a trusted friend. Some people need to go out for a run. I need to get away to a quiet, lonesome corner--preferably on the front steps at gloaming with the North Star trembling against the darkening blue. I need to set my pen fiercely against the page {for at such moments I must be writing--not typing.} and I need to convert the stress or excitement or happiness into something to be shared with another person. The beauty of the relationship between reading and writing is its give-and-take dynamic. For years I gathered and read every book in the near vicinity and absorbed tale upon tale, story upon story, adventures and sagas and dramas and classics. I fed my fancy, my tastes, and my ideas upon good books and thus those aspects of myself grew up to be none too shabby. When I began to employ my fancy, tastes, and ideas in writing my own books, the dawning of a strange and wonderful idea tinged the horizon of thought with blush-rose colors: If I persisted and worked hard and poured myself into the craft, I could create one of those books. One of the heart-books that foster a love of reading and even writing in another person somewhere. I could have a hand in forming another person's mind. A great responsibility and a great privilege that, and one I would love to be a party to. Books can change a person. I am a firm believer in that. I cannot tell you how many sentiments or noble ideas or parts of my own personality are woven from threads of things I've read over the years. I hoard quotations and shadows of quotations and general impressions of books like a tzar of Russia hoards his icy treasures. They make up a large part of who I am. I think it's worth saying again: books can change a person. For better or for worse. As a writer it's my two-edged gift to be able to slay or heal where I will. It's my responsibility to wield that weapon aright and do only good with my words. Or only purposeful cutting. I am not set against the surgeon's method of butchery--the nicking of a person's spirit, the rubbing in of a salty, stinging salve, and the ultimate healing-over of that wound that makes for a healthier person in the end. It's the bitter herbs that heal the best, so now and again you might be called upon to write something with more cayenne than honey about it. But the end must be good. We cannot let the Light fade from our words.

I was just about to get up when Dad rushed into the kitchen. He was in pajamas, which was totally bizarre. Dad never came down to breakfast until he was completely dressed. Of course, his pajamas even had a little pocket and handkerchief, so maybe he felt dressed. He had a sheet of paper in his hands and was staring at it, his eyes wide. “James,” Aislinn acknowledged. “You’re up kind of late this morning. Is Grace sleeping in, too?” Dad glanced up, and I could swear he blushed. :”Hmm? Oh. Yes. Well. In any case. Um…to the point at hand.” “Leave Dad alone,” I told Aislinn. “His Britishness is short-circuiting.” Instead of being grossed out, I was weirdly happy at the thought of my parents being all…whatever (okay, I was a little grossed out). In fact, their apparent reconciliation was maybe the one good thing to come out of this whole mess. Well, that and saving the world, obviously. Dad shook his head and held out the papers. “I didn’t come down here to discuss my personal…relations. I came here because this arrived from the Council this morning. I sat back in my chair. “The Council? Like, the Council Council? But they don’t even exist anymore. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it’s the Council For What Breakfast Cereals You Should-“ “Sophia,” Dad said, stopping me with a look. “Sorry. Freaked out.” He gave a little smile. “I know that, darling. And to be perfectly honest, perhaps you should be.” He handed the papers to me, and I saw it was some kind of official letter. It was addressed to Dad, but I saw my name in the first paragraph. I laid it on the table so no one would see my hands shake. “Did this come by owl?” I muttered. “Please tell me it came-“ “Sophie!” nearly everyone in the kitchen shouted. Even Archer was exasperated, “Come on, Mercer.” I took a deep breath and started to read. When I got about halfway down the page, I stopped, my eyes going wide, my heart racing. I looked back at Dad. “Are they serious?” “I believe that they are.” I read the words again. “Holy hell weasel.

A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity. In Zachariah, she sees infinity. Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale. There is a template for all things.

What, in watching a bunch of so-called analysts sitting around a table with empty coffee mugs, congratulating each other on agreeing with each other? The news isn’t news anymore, it’s just pompous opinionating, the purpose of which is to keep us anxious, because these people, these newspeople, even your beloved Rachel Maddow, they know that as long as they can keep us anxious, as long as they dangle the carrot of consolation in front of us, they’ve got us hooked. They’re no different than the French papers in 1940, just more sophisticated. And more venal.

Footsteps from the stairwell startle him out of the past. He turns around as Emma's mother takes the last step into the dining area, Emma right behind her. Mrs. McIntosh glides over and puts her arm around him. The smile on her face is genuine, but Emma's smile is more like a straight line. And she's blushing. "Galen, it's very nice to meet you," she says, ushering him into the kitchen. "Emma tells me you're taking her to the beach behind your house today. To swim?" "Yes, ma'am." Her transformation makes him wary. She smiles. "Well, good luck with getting her in the water. Since I'm a little pressed for time, I can't follow you over there, so I just need to see your driver's license while Emma runs outside to get your plate number." Emma rolls her eyes as she shuffles through a drawer and pulls out a pen and paper. She slams the door behind her when she leaves, which shakes the dishes on the wall. Galen nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands over the fake license. Mrs. McIntosh studies it and rummages through her purse until she produces a pen-which she uses to write on her hand. “Just need your license number in case we ever have any problems. But we’re not going to have any problems, are we, Galen? Because you’ll always have my daughter-my only daughter-home on time, isn’t that right?” He nods, then swallows. She holds out his license. When he accepts it, she grabs his wrist, pulling him close. She glances at the garage door and back to him. “Tell me right now, Galen Forza. Are you or are you not dating my daughter?” Great. She still doesn’t believe Emma. If she won’t believe them anyway, why keep trying to convince her? If she thinks they’re dating, the time he intends to spend with Emma will seem normal. But if they spend time together and tell her they’re not dating, she’ll be nothing but suspicious. Possibly even spy on them-which is less than ideal. So, dating Emma is the only way to make sure she mates with Grom. Things just get better and better. “Yes,” he says. “We’re definitely dating.” She narrows her eyes. “Why would she tell me you’re not?” He shrugs. “Maybe she’s ashamed of me.” To his surprise, she chuckles. “I seriously doubt that, Galen Forza.” Her humor is short lived. She grabs a fistful of his T-shirt. “Are you sleeping with her?” Sleeping…Didn’t Rachel say sleeping and mating are the same thing? Dating and mating are similar. But sleeping and mating are the same exact same. He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” She raises a no-nonsense brow. “Why not? What’s wrong with my daughter?” That is unexpected. He suspects this woman can sense a lie like Toraf can track Rayna. All she’s looking for is honesty, but the real truth would just get him arrested. I’m crazy about your daughter-I’m just saving her for my brother. So he seasons his answer with the frankness she seems to crave. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter, Mrs. McIntosh. I said we’re not sleeping together. I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” She inhales sharply and releases him. Clearing her throat, she smoothes out his wrinkled shirt with her hand, then pats his chest. “Good answer, Galen. Good answer.” Emma flings open the garage door and stops short. “Mom, what are you doing?” Mrs. McIntosh steps away and stalks to the counter. “Galen and I were just chitchatting. What took you so long?” Galen guesses her ability to sense a lie probably has something to do with her ability to tell one. Emma shoots him a quizzical look, but he returns a casual shrug. Her mother grabs a set of keys from a hook by the refrigerator and nudges her daughter out of the way, but not before snatching the paper out of her hand.

I knew where that instinct had come from, that insistence that the outlandish was worthwhile. It had germinated at my kitchen table in Washington, across scraps of paper and bits of language, across the pads of paper my father and I often filled together. Although sometimes, he worked alone. It was that instinct that had led me here, had led me in everything I did. Always. I was beginning to realize it when he died, but some of my belief had gone with him. Only now was it beginning to return. Patrick wasn’t wrong that I believed more than Rachel. Because perhaps one needed a little magic to make a narrow childhood more bearable.

She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking. In short, I fought off the impulse to tell Rachel to go fuck herself.

To Rachel Fenner. Steeple Aston 15 February 1968 Rachel, thanks for your letter. I am sorry about these moods but what can one do? I know of such things too. We are born to sorrow. And you are not the only one in whom things ‘do not fit’. I suspect it is a general human condition. (Before writing this letter I was reading Shakespeare’s sonnets: there’s a chap who suffered.) You know that I love you, and in no trivial sense. Don’t feel that I could be offended – I respect and value all that you feel, and you must just try to forgive my involuntary lack of ‘response’ in so far as it annoys you at times. We are hopelessly muddled and imperfect animals – I mean the lot of us – even Shakespeare. Thank God for art. Much love I

And George H. W. Bush did it. He delivered the message to Senator Glenn Beall, who then relayed that pressure to his brother George. George Beall donated his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. In those records is an official “memo to file” from July 1973, acknowledging the attempted intervention. “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn,” Beall writes, “the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to the Baltimore County investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew, [the engineer] Allen Greene [sic] and George Bush….The only specific information that he passed along to me that I can recall related to a complaint that he had heard from Bush to the effect that attorneys in this office were said to be harassing persons who had been questioned by us in the Baltimore County investigation.

I cast my gangly body into the shadow of the stable and watched them, curious to see my uncle with a triumphant smile on his mouth. He called for Jedha, the Master-at-Arms, and they spoke in low, swift voices before turning in to the house. I stayed in the shadows and trailed them through the hall into the mahogany library, the wooden doors left slightly ajar. I can’t remember what they said to one another—how my uncle had gotten the Providence Card away from the highwaymen—only that they were consumed with excitement. I waited for them to leave, my uncle fool enough not to lock the Card away, and I stole into the heart of the room. Writ on the top of the Card were two words: The Nightmare. My mouth opened, my childish eyes round. I knew enough of The Old Book of Alders to know this particular Providence Card was one of only two of its kind, its magic formidable, fearsome. Use it, and one had the power to speak into the minds of others. Use it too long, and the Card would reveal one’s darkest fears. But it wasn’t the Card’s reputation that ensnared me—it was the monster. I stood over the desk, unable to tear my eyes away from the ghastly creature depicted on the Card’s face. Its fur was coarse, traveling across its limbs and down its hunched spine to the top of its bristled tail. Its fingers were eerily long, hairless and gray, tipped by great, vicious claws. Its face was neither man nor beast, but something in between. I leaned closer to the Card, drawn by the creature’s snarl, its teeth jagged beneath a curled lip. Its eyes captured me. Yellow, bright as a torch, slit by long, catlike pupils. The creature stared up at me, unmoving, unblinking, and though it was made of ink and paper, I could not shake the feeling it was watching me as intently as I was watching it. Trying to grasp what happened next was like mending a shattered mirror. Even if I could realign the pieces, cracks in my memory still remained. All I’m certain of was the feel of the burgundy velvet—the unbelievable softness along the ridges of the Nightmare Card as my finger slipped across it. I remember the smell of salt and the white-hot pain that followed. I must have fallen or fainted, because it was dark outside when I awoke on the library floor. The hair on the back of my neck bristled, and when I sat up, I was somehow aware I was no longer alone in the library. That’s when I first heard it, the sound of those long, vicious claws tapping together. Click. Click. Click. I jumped to my feet, searching the library for an intruder. But I was alone. It wasn’t until it happened again—click, click, click—that I realized the library was empty. The intruder was in my mind.

If a man changes a toilet paper roll & no one is around to see it, did it really happen? #Mancode question of the day.

He wanted Rachel. Slow and passionate and deep as the ocean. But Rachel asked more of him than he could give. Fuck dilemmas. Fuck rocks and hard places. The razor-sharp edge of who she was hovered over his paper-thin excuse for a soul. He didn’t want that blade to fall. He couldn’t bear to push it away, either.

He stood there for a long moment, the note in his hand, and just looked at her. At the undeniable heartbreak in her, and the dignity and the vulnerability. Then he pressed the note into Neksa's hand and said, "Lesson learned. You shouldn't trust either of us." He was gone before she spoke again.

He leaned down and stared into the lion's savage eyes and said, "Come on, then, if you're coming. Take a bite. But if you do, everybody will know it wasn't an accident.

Are you going to the dining hall?" Glain smiled very briefly. It was a rare enough event, and it made her almost human. Almost pretty. "Are you asking to escort me, like some girl you're romancing? Jess. Don't waste your time. I'm extremely unavailable."... "Remind me never to be polite to you again," he said, and she laughed this time, came around, and draped a comrade's arm around his shoulders. "Of course I will.

we manage to say all the right words to each other, but they are hollow – the fancy wrapping paper around an empty box.

Think of it this way: alchemists of old relied on the energy provided by tides, the moon, sun, planets in alignment. Every experiment was delicate and had to be balanced just so, or there couldn't be a proper result. Obscurists have an inborn talent to provide that energy from within and not from the world around us; we are born with quintessence.

Archimedes taught that of all the five elements, quintessence is the most rare, the most valuable, the one that transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary. We are quintessence. It's a divine gift, and like all gifts, we must use it for the Library's greater glory.