Tropical Girl Quotes

Mary’s childhood was rough. She was frequently beaten and chastised by the nuns who served as her protectors and brutalized by the older girls in the orphanage. Oh how I wept those first few years of my life. My tears came like tropical storms. Every pore in my body wept. I heaved and shuddered and sighed. Everything around me seemed dark and terrifying.

The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.

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

Being her friend was like going to a tropical island for a little fun in the sun, only to be kidnapped by terrorists.

Mama’s gaze pierced her. As a girl, Minerva had envied her mother’s blue eyes. They’d seemed the color of tropical oceans and cloudless skies. But their color had faded over the years since Papa’s death. Now their blue was the hue of dyed cambric worn three seasons. Or brittle middle-class china. The color of patience nearly worn through.

Have you never known a cruel wind? What an easy, balmy, tropical life you must have! I never tease, madam! I coax, I beguile, I stomp, I throw tantrums, and for certain, I freeze — I am the Coldest and Harshest of all the Harsh Airs! I am the shiver of the world! But I do not tease. You can cause ever so much more trouble by taking folk seriously, asking just what they're doing and doing just what they ask.

I ended up in the nurse’s office after falling asleep in second period. She only agreed to not call my parents if I stayed under her supervision and rested. She wasn’t taking any chances with Dr. Lahey’s daughter and the heroine who’d saved the Ishida’s only girl, who, by the way, Ayden mentioned wasn’t back at school. She probably got to recover in her native habitat. Some far off exotic locale, lounging on a tropical beach drinking fruity umbrella drinks brought to her by hunky, scantily clad beach boys who rubbed her back with suntan oil and hung on her every word while I ran for my life in the Waiting World, woke from a coma, and, bam, back at school with ten million pounds of schoolwork to make up, and no beach boys. Except for Ayden. He’d make a good beach boy. But don’t get too excited. He’s just a pretend boyfriend. “You alright?” the nurse asked. “Fine.” “You’re sighing and making odd noises.” “Sorry.

If I had your life story, it would be the first thing I mentioned to anyone. ‘Hullo, I’m Chase Reynaud. I learned to toddle aboard a merchant ship, and the Seven Seas rocked my cradle. And have I mentioned that no tropical sunset could compare with your beauty?’ The women would fall into bed with me.” “Don’t they fall into bed with you anyway?” “That’s true. But they might do so a half minute faster. Over months and years, those half minutes add up. So let’s hear the rest of the tale.

Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…

On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket - and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Adana, he sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them.

On that day we first met... the one who called out to me was a girl more clear-blue than the ocean itself; in this wide ocean, I found you.

She hoped she would be lying on a sun-drenched veranda somewhere tropical, sipping rum while Nate painted her toenails Island Pink and, maybe, she dreamed, with a little girl at their feet chattering to her dolls in Russian and English. Would my children be synesthetes? What would Nate say after all these years of keeping the secret? Would we be happy together? Will it ever happen?

Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them a gate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. “End of tour,” he says. A girl says, “But what’s through there?” “Behind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.” “And what’s behind that?” “A third locked door, smaller yet.” “What’s behind that?” “A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.” The children lean forward. “And then?” “Behind the thirteenth door”—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—“is the Sea of Flames.” Puzzlement. Fidgeting. “Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?” The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision. The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. “It’s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?” They nod. He clears his throat. “Centuries ago, in the place we now call Borneo, a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty. But on the way back to his palace, the prince was attacked by men on horseback and stabbed in the heart.” “Stabbed in the heart?” “Is this true?” A boy says, “Hush.” “The thieves stole his rings, his horse, everything. But because the little blue stone was clenched in his fist, they did not discover it. And the dying prince managed to crawl home. Then he fell unconscious for ten days. On the tenth day, to the amazement of his nurses, he sat up, opened his hand, and there was the stone. “The sultan’s doctors said it was a miracle, that the prince never should have survived such a violent wound. The nurses said the stone must have healing powers. The sultan’s jewelers said something else: they said the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Their most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when he was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water. The sultan had the diamond fitted into a crown for the prince, and it was said that when the young prince sat on his throne and the sun hit him just so, he became so dazzling that visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself.” “Are you sure this is true?” asks a girl. “Hush,” says the boy. “The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed the prince was a deity, that as long as he kept the stone, he could not be killed. But something strange began to happen: the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became. In a month, he lost a brother to drowning and a second brother to snakebite. Within six months, his father died of disease. To make matters even worse, the sultan’s scouts announced that a great army was gathering in the east. "The prince called together his father’s advisers. All said he should prepare for war, all but one, a priest, who said he’d had a dream. In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she’d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.

Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.

Lily's taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to the Girls' Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic contrasts of life. She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.

Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn’t seen a million times before.

then went about locating and booking rare tropical birds to make up for the party’s otherwise lack of wildlife. No post-rehab bash is complete without a few representatives from the animal kingdom. They elegantly remind us that we’re all animals on this earth, constantly evolving yet eternally caged.

Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

SANCTUARY the safest place in the world is a book is a shifting land on top of a tree so high up that a belt can't reach is a closet opening into snow with a tropical child tumbling through is a river, a mermaid, a spaceship a girl with living tentacles for hair is a red-horned, gold-feathered angel a dusty crocodile on a second star is a fractional platform, another family one with only soft mothers and aunts is a meadow, is a menu of words an oxygen mask, chest compressions is a map for someone who has died many times, and wants to come back.

He saw her as he would always see her, a slender girl in a simple beige dress, curled in a large wing chair by the white fireplace. The chair was a gaudy piece patterned in greens and purples, like tropical flowers, with a scrawl of cerise breaking the pattern. Her hair was the color of palest gold, a silvery gold, and she wore it pulled away from her face into a curl at the back of her neck. She had a fine face, nothing pretty-pretty about it, a strong face with high cheek bones and a straight nose. Her eyes were beautiful, sea blue, slanted like wings; and her mouth was a beautiful curve. Yet she wasn’t beautiful; you wouldn’t look at her in a room of pretty women, in a bar or night spot. You wouldn’t notice her; she’d be too quiet; she was a lady and she wouldn’t want to be noticed.

Colin hid a grin. His stare, keen despite the deceptive softness of his lavender-gray eyes, settled on his admiral as he held the girl so tenderly in his arms. Sir Graham loved women, yes, but never had Colin seen him treat one with the sort of obsessive, worshipful devotion he’d bestowed upon Maeve Merrick from the moment he'd brought her aboard. He’d made a bed for her on the sofa tucked beside the starboard bulkhead, bathed her damp skin, and braided her hair to get the hot, heavy mass off her neck. He’d flung open all the stern windows and gone into a rare fit of temper when the tropical breezes had dimmed and the air grew sultry, hot and still. His demands had sent the harassed Dr. Ryder running for the escape of a rum bottle, a midshipman into tears, and the company into hushed and strained eagerness to obey every order relayed through the lieutenants’ speaking trumpets. And to top it all off, Sir Graham had had a blazing argument with Maeve’s formidable lieutenant, Enolia, over who would get custody of the convalescing Pirate Queen.

She was one of a group of girls he’d observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.

On days when I feel the most invisible, I lie in my bed and pretend I’m not who I really am. I pretend I’m a girl who lives far, far away in a tropical place and I know how to sail the sea. I imagine my life is the sea. My bronze, beautiful-self smells of coconut oil. The sun kisses my long, straight hair. I’ve never been to the ocean, and it’s the sound of the waves that makes me open my eyes and know for sure I’m not in my attic any more. All

Cassie. My daughter. A seven-year-old with a personality that was reminiscent of tropical weather – sunny, warm, adorable, good for the soul, but with occasional hurricanes and tornados which necessitated boarding up the windows and hiding under a bed until they passed.

But what is love? Is it measurable or quantifiable in any way? And must it be justifiable? Or even rational? And must love come from the heart? Or must it come only from the heart, as many have put forth over the course of time, that love is strictly a denizen of the heart? And how do we know if it is our heart or our head that speaks to us? Or is it simply something you talk yourself into? And why would a girl do such a thing? Because she feels like she ought to,

We’re in Key West Bight,” Gina replied. “We’re also here looking for someone else.” “Who?” Carly asked, as Amber turned and strutted toward them as if she were on a fashion runway. Her attitude reminded him of Cathy, a girl he’d gone out with several times when he’d returned home from boot camp. “Being aware of how you look to others,” Mam had often told him, “and striving to show others how you look, are two different things. One is neatness, and the other, vanity.

As a child, Lena had pored over pictures of tropical beaches in faraway lands, beaches where sand lay smooth and warm as a blanket. Those were not the beaches of Knob Knoster. She sifted crushed rock, bits of shell, and glass through her fingers. Everything around her was muted in shades of gray—water, sky, and land. She breathed in the distinctive smell of fish and tar. Waves licked the stony shore of the harbor and crashed against the riprap of a jetty. And Lena found that she was listening, as if the wild call of the ocean was familiar. It filled her with strange longings for adventure, longings Nana Crane would say no civilized girl should ever have. Her heart beat faster. Lena tried not to listen, afraid the ocean might call her name.

His new friends did not, perhaps, realize the overpowering effect of the sudden change upon this northernbred man; the effects of the moonlight and the soft trade-wind, the life of love which surrounded him here. Love whispered to him vaguely, compellingly. It summoned him from the palm fronds, rustling dryly in the continuous breeze; love was telegraphed through the shy, bovine eyes of the brown girls in his estate-house village; love assailed him in the breath of the honey-like sweet grass, undulating all day and all night under the white moonlight of the Caribbees, pouring over him intoxicatingly through his opened jalousies as he lay, often sleepless, through long nights of spice and balm smells on his mahogany bedstead—pale grass, looking like snow under the moon. The half-formulated yearnings which these sights and sounds were begetting were quite new and fresh in his experience. Here fresh instincts, newly released, stirred, flared up, at the glare of early-afternoon sunlight, at the painful scarlet of the hibiscus blooms, the incredible indigo of the sea—all these flames of vividness through burning days, wilting into a caressing coolness, abruptly, at the fall of the brief, tropic dusk. The fundament of his crystallizing desire was for companionship in the blazing life of this place of rapid growth and early fading, where time slipped away so fast. ("Sweet Grass")

This Song Is Not About A Girl (with Chet Faker) I'll hang partly over a mountain and retire They won't listen to the words i decide on This isn't a point or a rival Reaching from another human, devour I'll hang partly over a mountain and retire I don't know purple, though tropical They won't listen to the words i decide on I'm not gonna stop for everyone This isn't a point or a rival Pardon me for showing over-love Reaching from another human, DEVOUR I don't know purple, though tropical I'm not gonna stop for everyone Pardon me for showing over-love Easy to turn something for everyone I'm not gonna stop for everyone Pardon me for showing over-love Reaching from another human, devour Easy to turn something for everyone I'll hang partly over a mountain and retire I don't know purple, though tropical They won't listen to the words I decide on I'm not gonna stop for everyone This isn't a point or a rival Pardon me for showing over-love Reaching from another human, devour

On the other stage, there was a girl who looked like a mix of Japanese and something Mediterranean or Latin. A good mix. She had that silky, almost shimmering black hair so many modern Japanese women like to ruin with chapatsu dye, worn short and swept over from the side. The shape of the eyes was also Japanese, and she was on the petite side. But her skin, a smooth gold like melted caramel, spoke of something else, something tropical. Her breasts and hips, too, appealingly full and slightly incongruous on her Japanese-sized frame, suggested some foreign origin. She was using the pole skillfully, grabbing it high, posing with her body held rigid and parallel to the floor, then spiraling down in time to the music. There was real vitality in her moves and she didn’t seem to mind that most of the patrons were focused on the blonde. Mr. Ruddy held out a chair for me at an empty table in the center of the room. After a routine glance to ensure the seat afforded a proper view of the entrance, I sat. I wasn’t displeased to see that I also had a good view of the stage where the dark-haired girl was dancing. “Wow,” I said in English, looking at her. “Yes, she is beautiful,” he replied, also in English. “Would you like to meet her?” I watched her for another moment before answering. I didn’t want to wind up with one of the Japanese girls here. I would have a better chance of creating rapport, and therefore of eliciting information, by chatting with a foreigner while playing the role of foreigner. I nodded.

The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking business." He has had a full program all day---conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time, he decides to lay aside his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the garcon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we've got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes, he's dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room---and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.

La Tata’s eyes conjuring a memorized motherly anger, the same anger brought on her by her sick mother, by the vecinas, by her patronizing sisters, an anger spilling out of every single mother, a rehearsed womanly conviction, a learned frown, hands arched on hips, pursed lips, eyes vaguely shut vibrating to the rhythm of the vocal cords—the posture of every Colombian mother, a hologram passed on through generations to land on the next girl’s body in a Now you are gonna tell me ahora mismito where carajos are you getting all that money y ay Myriam del Socorro Juan that you lie to me. Y agárrate muela picá que lo que viene es candela. Myriam

Even La Tata met with the Madre Superiora after finding Mami’s notebooks dripping with worm goo, the nun’s response a mere We’re doing everything we can, señora. But, you know, girls tease each other. Indignant, La Tata knew this had everything to do with the monies. Everything to do with becoming a no one in a city built for someones. The frustration overwhelming, and before she could stop herself, a Váyase a comer mierda monja hijueputa sped out of her mouth.

that kind of girl brings trouble wherever she works. Oh, I’m not saying she isn’t nice enough to speak to. So polite and nice butter wouldn’t melt. But I always say these tropics can do something to nice girls to make them forget their upbringing, and forget plain decency.

What about me?” Daisy asked. “You,” Alexandra said, crouching close, “will be our quartermaster. That means you’ll ration food and water for the crew. And since we’re so undermanned, you’ll also take on the most important duty of all: ship’s surgeon. There are oh so many diseases and maladies that afflict pirates. Scurvy, malaria, tropical fever . . .” Daisy’s eyes lit up. “Plague?” “Yes, darling. Even plague.

Well, entonces? Excuse me, Francisca, but if you abhor that institution, as you claim you do, then it seems contradictory that you care about this Carmen girl?

Tell me, Monsieur De Becque," a nurse asked. "Is it true that most white men in the tropics are running away from something?" The Frenchman turned in his chair to face his impertinent questioner. She was a young girl, so he smiled. "Yes," he said. "I believe that is true. Suppose that I was running away from something. Where could I find a lovelier spot than this?" He swept his hand across the front of the veranda and pointed toward the silent peaks of Vanicoro. "As a matter of fact," he said in a quiet voice, "is not each of you running away from something? You were not married yet, your lovers were at war, or your wives were beginning to bore you. I don't think it wise to inquire too closely into reasons why anybody is anywhere!" He smiled at the embarrassed nurse. p111

His gaze dropped to the studio bed: still half-unmade. On the undisturbed half, nearest the wall, there stretched out a long, colorful scatter of magazines, science-fiction paperbacks, a few hardcover detective novels still in their wrappers, a few bright napkins taken home from restaurants, and a half-dozen of those shiny little Golden Guides and Knowledge Through Color books—his recreational reading as opposed to his working materials and references arranged on the coffee table beside the bed. They'd been his chief—almost his sole—companions during the three years he'd laid sodden there stupidly goggling at the TV across the room; but always fingering them and stupefiedly studying their bright, easy pages from time to time. Only a month ago it had suddenly occurred to him that their gay casual scatter added up to a slender, carefree woman lying beside him on top of the covers—that was why he never put them on the floor; why he contented himself with half the bed; why he unconsciously arranged them in a female form with long, long legs. They were a "scholar's mistress," he decided, on the analogy of "Dutch wife," that long, slender bolster sleepers clutch to soak up sweat in tropical countries—a very secret playmate, a dashing but studious call girl, a slim, incestuous sister, eternal comrade of his writing work.

His gaze dropped to the studio bed: still half-unmade. On the undisturbed half, nearest the wall, there stretched out a long, colorful scatter of magazines, science-fiction paperbacks, a few hardcover detective novels still in their wrappers, a few bright napkins taken home from restaurants, and a half-dozen of those shiny little golden Guides and Knowledge Through Color books—his recreational reading as opposed to his working materials and references arranged on the coffee table beside the bed. They'd been his chief—almost his sole—companions during the three years he'd laid sodden there stupidly goggling at the TV across the room; but always fingering them and stupefiedly studying their bright, easy pages from time to time. Only a month ago it had suddenly occurred to him that their gay casual scatter added up to a slender, carefree woman lying beside him on top of the covers—that was why he never put them on the floor; why he contented himself with half the bed; why he unconsciously arranged them in a female form with long, long legs. They were a "scholar's mistress," he decided, on the analogy of "Dutch wife," that long, slender bolster sleepers clutch to soak up sweat in tropical countries—a very secret playmate, a dashing but studious call girl, a slim, incestuous sister, eternal comrade of his writing work.

An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled. No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath. Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear. Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers. Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn't apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.

They pedaled silently to Tropical Kiss, Natalie praying they’d find Ashley. Her stomach constricted as they pulled up to the juice bar. It didn’t appear to be open. They stopped their bikes and got off. Natalie squinted at the door, looking for the business hours. Twisting the doorknob, she was surprised to find it unlocked. She pushed it inward, a bell hanging from the door dinging. “Hello?

Everyone loves bands. We could pretend we’re a rock group and lip synch all the music.” “That’s not different enough. Everyone expects us to plan something really special,” Ariel complained. “After all, most of us are old-timers. We know the ropes around camp. Even first-timers like Becky could plan that kind of party.” Even a bunch of first-timers like me, huh? What a slam! I punched my fist into the wad of clothes in my suitcase and Triple Tropical Bubble Gum popped up all over. More than anything, I wanted to show these girls that I was special, too. “Too bad you can’t have live music,” I said slyly. Carefully, I pulled my posters of Eric and Outta Site out of my bag. I took a wad of Triple Tropical out of my mouth, broke it into pieces, and stuck it on the corners of my posters. Then, I hung the posters next to my bed. Triple Tropical is great for hanging things on walls. According to my mom it never lets go. “Where would we get live music?” Suzanne asked with a sneer. “I suppose we could have the kitchen staff play on their pots and pans with spoons.” “And the counselors could blow their whistles!” Ariel giggled. “We could clap our hands and hum,” Meg suggested. Denni chuckled. “Great idea, Becky!

Eve Merrion had developed from a kindly, light-hearted girl into a mature woman of wide information and generous mind. Her sister, Emmeline, had married an officer in the Indian Army, and her environment since her marriage had crystallized all that was conventional in her. “Empire, Prestige, Dignity”—these were Emmeline’s values, described laughingly by Eve as “E.P.D.” In the narrow sphere of army life and thought, Emmeline had grown into what her sister ruefully described as “a perfect lady, perfect within the limitations of social convention.” Emmeline, at thirty-three, was a beautiful woman, still slender, her fine skin unspoiled by tropical suns, though there were wrinkles around her fine dark eyes, and something in her expression told of weariness and disillusionment.

NOVELS Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Exley, Frederick. A Fan's Notes. Kohler, Sheila. One Girl. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. Salter, James. Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime. Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers. Welch, James. The Death of Jim Loney. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room Is Empty. SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS Bloom, Amy. Come to Me. Cameron, Peter. The Half You Don't Know. Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From. Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To. Houston, Pam. Cowboys Are My Weakness. Johnson, Denis. Jesus' Son. Nugent, Beth. City of Boys. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Perrotta, Tom. Bad Haircut. White, Edmund. Skinned Alive. Yates, Richard. Liars in Love.

When small-town girl Emma LaRue won a vacation to an exclusive tropical island, a last minute cancellation

Marita Lorenz, was born on August 18, 1939, in Bremen, Germany. In January of 1960 Marita, described as an attractive “curvy, black-haired young lady was named American’s “Mata Hari” by New York Daily News reporter Paul Meskil. Having had an affair with Fidel Castro that turned sour, she now returned to Havana where she attempted to take part in an assassination attempt, supposedly orchestrated by the Mafia and the CIA. Marita brought along poison pills in her cold cream jar, which predictably melted in the tropical heat. Besides, she later said that she really did not have the stomach for killing her former lover. Apparently Castro aware of why she returned to Cuba, handed her his pistol with a dare for her to use it. Even after knowing the truth regarding her visit, he allowed her to safely leave Cuba. Returning to Miami, Marita said that Frank Sturgis, presumably a CIA operative, was involved in this attempt, however it was his close associate, Alex Rorke, who was responsible for orchestrating the plan to poison Castro. Sturgis was extremely angry when she returned and rebuked her for putting the pills into the warm cold cream, calling her stupid, over and over again. For a few years after leaving the island, Marita was looked after and protected by a mobster named Ed Levi. It was his job to protect her from, what was considered, a likely attempt on her life by “Cuban Intelligence Operatives.” In 1961, Marita met Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the former President of Venezuela, in Miami. Marcos told her that he was anxious to meet her because he knew she was “Fidel's girl." He successfully pursued Marita, and when she gave in, they had an affair that resulted in the birth of a daughter.

day something happens in your life that presents you with a choice and it’s up to you what you do with that choice. It’s easy to play safe and stick with what we know. ‘But I’m wild,’ I thought. ‘I refuse to play safe.’ At the end of Valentine’s Day, as if sensing the waves of frustration and claustrophobia coming from the cast, the captain decided to give us the whole of the following day off, which was practically unheard of. To say that we needed to flop on a sun-soaked tropical beach makes us sound like spoilt brats and actually a freezing-cold stroll along the front at Blackpool would have been just as welcome if it had distracted us from our tired bodies and whirring minds. Anything to get away from relentlessly running through new routines to replace routines that had been reworked and replaced several times already. When I’m feeling low, it doesn’t usually take long for me to bounce back. At the end of a day spent lazing with the dancers on the beach I felt refreshed and renewed. ‘I’m definitely going to resign,’ I thought as I showered and dressed for the evening. It was the right decision and I vowed to deliver my letter in the morning. I ran my fingers through my hair and winked at my reflection in the mirror. Then I went up to the bar and my whole life changed in an instant. 10 The Way You Look Tonight The night I met Henrik Brixen I was ready for a bit of romance in my life. I hadn’t had a serious relationship in years, it was time. ‘I’m looking for the man of my dreams,’ I confided in my friends. ‘He’s got to be tall, blond, handsome, strong and ambitious …’ They laughed. ‘Not asking much, then?’ My friend, Günter Boodenstein, was on the lookout for me. Günter oversaw the ship’s engines and I often had a drink with him and his wife, Angelica, when she came aboard; they were lovely people and we became very pally. I bumped into Günter on the gangway as I was leaving the ship to go to the beach with the dancers on my day off. ‘Waiting for someone?’ I asked him. His face lit up. ‘Jane! You’re just the person I wanted to see. I have someone called Henrik Brixen coming onboard to have a look at the boiler.’ ‘Oh, yes? Up my street?’ He smiled. ‘Right up your street.’ A boiler man didn’t sound very promising, but I was prepared to keep an open mind. Günter and I agreed to meet up in the bar later and I went off to the beach. When Henrik arrived, Günter told him, ‘There’s a girl you should meet.’ Was there something in the stars that night? There was definitely some kind of magic, because the air seemed to glitter as Günter introduced me

Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman - almost a bride - was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead—struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.

It’ll feel too tropical. That’s not the aesthetic at all,