Wallpaper Love Quotes

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

fuck she pulled her dress off over her head and I saw the panties indented somewhat into the crotch. it's only human. now we've got to do it. I've got to do it after all that bluff. it's like a party-- two trapped idiots. under the sheets after I have snapped off the light her panties are still on. she expects an opening performance. I can't blame her. but wonder why she's here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned? we didn't have to do it yet we had to do it. it was something like establishing new credibility with the income tax man. I get the panties off. I decide not to tongue her. even then I'm thinking about after it's over. we'll sleep together tonight trying to fit ourselves inside the wallpaper. I try, fail, notice the hair on her head mostly notice the hair on her head and a glimpse of nostrils piglike I try it again.

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then.

Each time a person’s essence was captured, the copper pot glowed. Not once did the happy couples notice the pot as Joroku’s golden nails carved the intricate design. Just like when he cut the silhouette for Lyly and her friend, Patrick. They were too much in love to feel their souls bleed.

Lovers tend to be philosophical, achievers are practical.

Books enveloped the room floor to ceiling like wallpaper.

We’ll sleep together tonight trying to fit ourselves inside the wallpaper.

I left her wallpapering her much-loved, much-tended little corner of hell.

Pragmatism is good prevention for problems.

You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you’re just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you’ve just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he’s sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That’s all," he says. "It’s just one of those afternoons." We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch. I should say I love him. I should say it will be all right. But it won’t. I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry. I know those afternoons.

Do you love him enough to do something to win him — to really put yourself out somewhat for that purpose?

I want to marry you, Malda - because I love you - because you are young and strong and beautiful - because you are wild and sweet and - fragrant, and - elusive, like the wild flowers you love. Because you are so truly an artist in your special way, seeing beauty and giving it to others. I love you because of all of this, because you are rational and highminded and capable of friendship - and in spite of your cooking!” “But - how do you want to live?” “As we did here - at first,” he said. “There was peace, exquisite silence. There was beauty - nothing but beauty. There were the clean wood odors and flowers and fragrances and sweet wild wind. And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then.

To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter—professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space—was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter—pleasure, joy, friendship, love—was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally.

Family members are like default wallpapers that come with a computer. We don't choose them; we just get used to them.

This is the part of anguish grey curtains blue & wallpapers yellow. This is the part where I learn to lose you & try to gain me back. This is a part where the end is my start!

The guilt of moving on seeps into my life every time I do something I thought I couldn’t do without you. Every time I make a financial decision, I take over your job. Every time I fix the washing machine, choose a wallpaper without consulting you, I feel guilty. How dare I function without you! What could you have possibly meant to me if I can function without you? Much less, function well. Every so often I’m overwhelmed with the decisions. In those moments I hate you for leaving me. But I am stronger now, and I like being strong. And for this, I feel guilty. When can I stop proving that I loved you? When will I stop believing that loving you better might have saved you?

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow.

Wrap him up in floral wallpaper, wishing the envelopes I seal were his lips, leaving hickeys like stamps to show where he's been.

I'm wallpaper now. That's it. That's all I am.

Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.

I am a plant, she said, I need fire, earth, water. Otherwise I will be stunted. And: Is marriage not such a stunting? The fire goes out. The wind grows weak. The earth dries out. The water dwindles. I would die. You too. She tossed her hair over her shoulders. Purple lavender. And what if it wasn't like that, I argued. What if the daily routine, our daily routine, is my promise to you? Your toothbrush next to mine. You get annoyed because I've forgotten to turn the light off in the bathroom. We choose wallpaper we think is horrible a year later. You tell me I'm getting a belly. Your forgetfulness. You've left your umbrella somewhere again. I snore, you can't sleep. In my dream I whisper your name...You tie my tie. Wave goodbye to me as I go to work. I think: you are like a fluttering flag. I think it with a stabbing pain in my heart. For Heaven's sake, is that not enough? Is that not enough to be happy? She turned away: Give me time. I'll think about it.

She loved her room. She had window seats and shutters, flowered wallpaper, and a bed with too many pillows. Her mother called the decor "romance and drama," and said the room looked like it belonged to a fairy princess.

I don’t like to think of her as pretend Peabody anymore. The more we find out, the meaner and crazier she gets. It’s like it’s bad enough fake Peabody got murdered, but now fake Peabody is a dead, blackmailing asshole on top of it. It’s depressing.” “Yeah, it’s all really too bad for you.” “Well, it kind of is. How am I supposed to enjoy the vid now, when I’ll be thinking how behind the scenes I was trying to blackmail McNab into bed, and the whole time he’s in love with you? And that maybe there’s a vid of the two of you all naked and sexy and—” “Stop right there before I boot.” “Hey! Maybe there’s a vid of fake Peabody and fake Roarke all naked and sexy. That would definitely make up for it. Maybe I can get a copy.” “There’s going to be a vid of me tearing strips off your ass then using them to wallpaper my office. I’ll make copies for everybody. Get Marlo down here. I’ll start on Julian.

The house, she couldn't help noticing, was just the right size for her in her present form, but not proportionally; it was built for a rabbit's movements and habits. Doors were fatter, rounder, and shorter. There were lovely paintings of carrots and dill artfully arranged on the lettuce-print wallpaper along with the usual long-eared silhouettes. Lovely little velvet King Louis chairs were more like tuffets for resting on with all (four) of your legs pulled up under you.

To be invisible means to never ask for anything, never cause trouble, never make any kind of demand. The child who chooses this role scrupulously avoids adding any burden to her already stressed family. She stays in her room, or blends into the wallpaper, she says very little and makes what she does say noncommittal. In school she is neither bad nor good, in fact, she is rarely remembered at all, her contribution to the family is to not exist. As for her own pain, she is numb, she feels nothing.

She knows he's not the same. He's different now. The eyes that once held too much contain nothing at all. He is colorless. Faded like sun-drenched wallpaper. The man that stands before her has no answers to her questions, and no ointment for her fears.

Jenny remembers what it was like, all those years ago. It was never dolls for her, nothing so tangible as that. It was more of a feeling. As if, for the first several years of her life, everything held over her a sort of knowledge and insistence. Fence posts, wallpaper, the lawn at certain hours of the day. These things glowered at her, or smiled. Even something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father's office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day, there wasn't. The blue chair rolled on its wheels to the window when she pushed it. The rising dust was rising dust. And when it was gone, there was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom. It's why we fall in love, Jenny will tell June. We fall in love to get back to that dimension, that wonder. She goes to the laundry room, where, from a pile of clean clothes, she picks out a few articles of June's, folds them, then goes upstairs to knock on her daughter's door and tell her that this, this lost doll world, is the reason there is love.

Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort? How did it feel? He'd been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he'd also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it. And he'd been in mansions that felt like mausoleums.

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment. Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked down the other side of the street, sorry and amused at their loss of cool. We avoided newspapers and television. They were full of lies, and we knew all the stuff we needed. We spent our government grants on books, dope, acid, jug wine, and cheap food from the supermarket--variegated cheese scraps bundled roughly together, white cabbage and bacon ends, dented tins of tomatoes from the bargain bin. Everything was beautiful, the stars and the sunsets, the mold that someone discovered at the back of the fridge, the cows in the fields that kicked their giddy heels up in the air and fled as we ranged through the Yorkshire woods decked in daisy chains, necklaces made of melon seeds and tie-dye T-shirts whose colors stained the bath tub forever--an eternal reminder of the rainbow generation. [81-82]

Under the pretense of wanting to record the history of my brother’s year at college, I’d asked to take a picture of Sam with his roommate. Unfortunately, the zoom on my digital camera had somehow been pressed—by a renegade finger, I assumed—and I’d only been able to get a really good close-up shot of Brad. No evidence of Sam in sight. Gosh, darn. What a shame! The photo was now the background wallpaper on my computer desktop.

She hadn't loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food - all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.

Look,let me give you the CliffNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care.Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks,there's some exchanging of flowers.A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see." "You don't understand." "What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on,if you're going to zigzag through your past,make it count. Let's hit some highlights. Luce didn't budge. "Is there a way to make you disappear?" "Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move!" "I need to see that he loves me, not just some idea of me because of some curse that he's bound to.I need to feel like there's something stronger keeping us together. Something real." Bill took a seat next to Luce on the grass. Then he seemed to think better of it and actually crawled onto her lap. At first,she wanted to swat him, and the flies buzzing around his head,but when he looked up at her,his eyes appeared sincere. "Honey,Daniel loving the real you is the last thing you should be worried about. You're freaking soul mates. You two coined the phrase. You don't have to stick around here to see that.It's in every life.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyond our current understanding, appear absurd is as hard to bear in the context of a piece of furniture in a shop as it is in the context of a prospective spouse at an altar.

You're fixing everything I set down." He nods at my hands, which are readjusting the elephant. "It wasn't polite of me to come in and start touching your things." "Oh,it's okay," I say quickly, letting go of the figurine. "You can touch anything of mine you want." He freezes. A funny look runs across his face before I realize what I've said. I didn't mean it like that. Not that that/i> would be so bad. But I like Toph,and St. Clair has a girlfriend. And even if the situation were different, Mer still has dibs. I'd never do that to her after how nice she was my first day.And my second. And every other day this week. Besides,he's just an attractive boy. Nothing to get worked up over. I mean, the streets of Europe are filled with beautiful guys, right? Guys with grooming regimens and proper haircuts and stylish coats.Not that I've seen anyone even remotely as good-looking as Monsieur Etienne St.Clair.But still. He turns his face away from mine. Is it my imagination or does he look embarrassed? But why would he be embarrassed? I'm the one with the idiotic mouth. "Is that your boyfriend?" He points to my laptop's wallpaper, a photo of my coworkers and me goofing around. It was taken before the midnight release of the lastest fantasy-novel-to-film adaptation. Most of us were dressed like elves or wizards. "The one with his eyes closed?" "WHAT?" He thinks I'd date a guy like Hercules Hercules is an assistant manager. He's ten years older than me and,yes, that's his real name. And even though he's sweet and knows more about Japanese horror films than anyone,he also has a ponytail. A ponytail. "Anna,I'm kidding.This one. Sideburns." He points to Toph,the reason I love the picture so much.Our heads are turned into each other, and we're wearing secret smiles,as if sharing a private joke. "Oh.Uh...no.Not really.I mean, Toph was my almost-boyfriend.I moved away before..." I trail off, uncomfortable. "Before much could happen.

The room was dark, though weak autumnal light filtered in through arched windows high on the walls, illuminating the room's rich aubergine brocade wallpaper. Its color cast a soft violet haze that floated through the bedroom, twinkling the huge diamond-shaped crystals that dropped from two immense, many-tiered silver chandeliers. They were larger than any I had ever seen, things out of a palace or a fairy tale. An imposing, heavily carved wardrobe, which looked as if it had been in place since the early fifteenth century, faced the bed where I lay. Beside it on the wall hung a large bronze shield with an iron French cross at its center, crowned by a gilded fleur-de-lis with a dazzling gemstone in the middle of the petal. Large portraits of nude ladies, odalisques that looked as if an Italian master- Titian, perhaps?- had painted them graced the adjacent wall. A heavy crystal vase of white long-stemmed roses sat on a table at the bedside, their petals tight, but their sweet perfume filling the air, mingling with the aroma of fresh baked bread. I ran my hands down my body. I was not in my own nightdress but in a pale green gown of fine quality damask silk with a triangular neckline and long, full sleeves that cupped my wrists, draping white lace over my hands to the fingers. I had never seen such a rich garment. I imagined it was something that the queen's daughters would have worn.

Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a fur coat. No, really, go ahead. Ask me. The secret is cornmeal and brushing the fur the wrong way. The tricky part is keeping your mouth shut. To get blood off of piano keys, polish them with talcum powder or powdered milk. This isn’t the most marketable job skill, but to get bloodstains out of wallpaper, put on a paste of cornstarch and cold water. This will work just as well to get blood out of a mattress or a davenport. The trick is to forget how fast these things can happen. Suicides. Accidents. Crimes of passion. Just concentrate on the stain until your memory is completely erased. Practice really does make perfect. If you could call it that. Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth. You have a God-given knack for committing a terrible sin. It’s your calling. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing. If you could call it that. Even after sixteen years of cleaning people’s houses, I want to think the world is getting better and better, but really I know it’s not. You want there to be some improvement in people, but there won’t be. And you want to think there’s something you can get done. Cleaning this same house every day, all that gets better is my skill at denying what’s wrong. God forbid I should ever meet who I work for in person. Please don’t get the idea I don’t like my employers. The caseworker has gotten me lots worse postings. I don’t hate them. I don’t love them, but I don’t hate them. I’ve worked for lots worse. Just ask me how to get urine stains out of drapes and a tablecloth. Ask me what’s the fastest way to hide bullet holes in a living-room wall. The answer is toothpaste. For larger calibers, mix a paste of equal parts starch and salt. Call me the voice of experience.

I feel like finally, I’ve gotten it together: I’ve hit my stride. I can do this. So when I walk into school that cold January morning, holding Peter’s hand, full on banana pancakes, with a new job and wearing Margot’s Fair Isle sweater she left behind, I am feeling good. Great, even. Peter wants to stop in the computer lab to print out his English paper, so that’s our first stop. He logs in, and I gasp out loud when I see the wallpaper. Someone has taken a still of the hot tub video, of me in Peter’s lap in my red flannel nightgown, skirt hitched up around my thighs, and across the top it reads HOT HOT TUB SEX. And on the bottom--YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. “What the hell?” Peter mutters, looking around the computer lab. Nobody looks up. He goes to the next computer--same picture, different caption. SHE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE on top. HE’S HAPPY WITH WHAT HE CAN GET across the bottom. We are a meme.

That we never allowed," answered Somel quietly. "Allowed?" I queried. "Allowed a mother to rear her own children?" "Certainly not," said Somel, "unless she was fit for that supreme task." This was rather a blow to my previous convictions. "But I thought motherhood was for each of you--" "Motherhood--yes, that is, maternity, to bear a child. But education is our highest art, only allowed to our highest artists." "Education?" I was puzzled again. "I don't mean education. I mean by motherhood not only child-bearing, but the care of babies." "The care of babies involves education, and is entrusted only to the most fit," she repeated. "Then you separate mother and child!" I cried in cold horror, something of Terry's feeling creeping over me, that there must be something wrong among these many virtues. "Not usually," she patiently explained. "You see, almost every woman values her maternity above everything else. Each girl holds it close and dear, an exquisite joy, a crowning honor, the most intimate, most personal, most precious thing. That is, the child-rearing has come to be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands--even our own." "But a mother's love--" I ventured. She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation. "You told us about your dentists," she said, at length, "those quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other persons' teeth--even in children's teeth sometimes." "Yes?" I said, not getting her drift. "Does mother-love urge mothers--with you--to fill their own children's teeth? Or to wish to?" "Why no--of course not," I protested. "But that is a highly specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman --any mother!" "We do not think so," she gently replied. "Those of us who are the most highly competent fulfill that office; and a majority of our girls eagerly try for it--I assure you we have the very best." "But the poor mother--bereaved of her baby--" "Oh no!" she earnestly assured me. "Not in the least bereaved. It is her baby still--it is with her--she has not lost it. But she is not the only one to care for it. There are others whom she knows to be wiser. She knows it because she has studied as they did, practiced as they did, and honors their real superiority. For the child's sake, she is glad to have for it this highest care.

Something diseased and furry had crawled into her mouth and expired while she slept. That was the only possible explanation as to why Neve had a rancid taste in her mouth and a heavy, viscous paste coating her teeth and tongue. ‘I think I’m dying,’ she groaned. The wretched state of her mouth was the least of it. There was a pounding in her head, echoed in the roiling of her gut, and her bones ached, her vital organs ached, her throat ached, even her hair follicles ached. ‘You’re not dying,’ said a voice in her ear, which sounded like nails scraping down a blackboard, even though Max’s voice had barely risen above a whisper. ‘You’ve got a hangover.’ Neve had had hangovers before and they just made her feel a tiny bit nauseous and grouchy. This felt like the bastard child of bubonic plague and the ebola virus. ‘Dying,’ she reiterated, and now she realised that she was in bed, which had been a very comfy bed the last time she’d slept in it, but now it felt as if she was lying on a pile of rocks, and even though she had the quilt and Max’s arm tucked around her, she was still cold and clammy. Neve tried to raise her head but her gaze collided with the stripy wallpaper and as well as searing her retinas, it was making her stomach heave. ‘Sick. Going to be sick.’ ‘Sweetheart, I don’t think so,’ Max said, stroking the back of her neck with feather-soft fingers. ‘You’ve already thrown up just about everything you’ve eaten in the last week.’ ‘Urgh …’ Had she? The night before was a big gaping hole in her memory. ‘What happened?’ ‘I don’t know what happened but I got a phone call from the Head of Hotel Security at three in the morning asking me if I could identify a raving madwoman in a silver dress who couldn’t remember her room number but insisted that someone called Max Pancake was sleeping there. They thought you might be a hack from the Sunday Mirror pretending to be absolutely spannered as a way of getting into the hotel.’ ‘Oh, no …’ ‘Yeah, apparently Ronaldo’s staying in one of the penthouse suites and I saw Wayne and Coleen in the bar last night. Anyway, as you were staggering down the corridor, you told me very proudly that you’d lost your phone and you’d just eaten two pieces of KFC and a bag of chips.’ ‘KFC? Oh, God …’ ‘But I wouldn’t worry about that because after you’d tried to persuade me to have my wicked way with you, you started throwing up and you didn’t stop, not for hours. I thought you were going to sleep curled around the toilet at one point.’ ‘Goodness …

Of course anyone who loves books buys more of them than she or he can hope to read in a lifetime. A good book, resting unopened on a slot in its shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Sarah was soon lugging pasteboard boxes, paper packages and rolled samples of wallpaper. She had seen all of this before: she had daydreamed it. It was all very fine, but it was not as lovely as the daydream, and the packages slithered and slipped from her grip, and a box dug into her side, and how could it be that one printed paper was so vitally, importantly lovely and another was entirely dismissable, or that any or that any of it really mattered so very much, or indeed at all?

If you get on your hands and knees in one of the offices and press a little red button, you can crawl into the “Love Lounge,” originally a ventilating shaft that’s about five feet wide and that now sports leopard-skin wallpaper, Barry White music, and a red lava lamp. Steve signed the wallpaper: “This is why we built this building, Steve Jobs.

...I conducted a number of experiments to get in touch with my future self. Here are my favorite three: • Fire up AgingBooth. While hiring a programmer to create a 3-D virtual reality simulator is probably out of your price range, I personally love an app called AgingBooth, which transforms a picture of your face into what you will look like in several decades. There are also other apps like it, like Merrill Edge’s web app that shows you a live avatar of what you’ll look like at retirement (faceretirement.merilledge.com). AgingBooth is my favorite of them all, and it’s available for both Android and iOS, and it’s free. On the website for this book (productivityprojectbook.com), you can see what to expect out of the app—I’ve framed a picture of myself that hangs above my computer in my office, where I see it every day. Visitors are usually freaked out. • Send a letter to your future self. Like the letter I wrote at camp, writing and sending a letter to yourself in the future is a great way to bridge the gap between you and your future self. I frequently use FutureMe.org to send emails to myself in the future, particularly when I see myself being unfair to future me. • Create a future memory. I’m not a fan of hocus-pocus visualizations, so I hope this doesn’t sound like one. In her brilliant book The Wallpaper Instinct, Kelly McGonigal recommends creating a memory of yourself in the future—like one where you don’t put off a report you’re procrastinating on, or one where you read ten interesting books because you staved off the temptation of binge-watching three seasons of House of Cards on Netflix. Simply imagining a better, more productive version of yourself down the line has been shown to be enough to motivate you to act in ways that are helpful for your future self.

Mark put his bag on the floor and looked around. Chintz wallpaper with pink roses on a light cream background covered the walls, while drapes of the same pattern fell across French doors that obviously led outside.

He glanced around, as if taking in the surroundings for the first time. "Is this your childhood room?" he asked. "There's a lot of black." "Well, I didn't paint it that way until I was fourteen and capable of making cryptic comments about how I wanted my room to match my soul. When this was truly my childhood bedroom, it was perfectly normal, thank you very much. I had a wallpaper border with roses on it and an American Girl doll on the dresser and everything." "Let me guess." He narrowed his eyes at me. "Samantha." "Not all brunette girls needed to own a Samantha doll," I said, affronted. "But yes, it was Samantha. She had a really cool tartan cape and a valise and she stood up against child labor, so don't think she was just some prissy rich girl.

ON THE DISCOMFORT OF BEING IN THE SAME ROOM AS THE BOY YOU LIKE Everyone is looking at you looking at him. Everyone can tell. He can tell. So you spend most of your time not looking at him. The wallpaper, the floor, there are cracks in the ceiling. Someone has left a can of iced tea in the corner, it is half-empty, I mean half-full. There are four light bulbs in the standing lamp, there is a fan. You are counting things to keep from looking at him. Five chairs, two laptops, someone’s umbrella, a hat. People are talking so you look at their faces. This is a good trick. They will think you are listening to them and not thinking about him. Now he is talking. So you look away. The cracks in the ceiling are in the shape of a whale or maybe an elephant with a fat trunk. If he ever falls in love with you, you will lie on your backs in a field somewhere and look up at the sky and he will say, Baby, look at that silly cloud, it is a whale! and you will say, Baby, that is an elephant with a fat trunk, and you will argue for a bit, but he will love you anyway. He is asking a question now and no one has answered it yet. So you lower your eyes from the plaster and say, The twenty-first, I think, and he smiles and says, Oh, cool, and you smile back, and you cannot stop your smiling, oh, you cannot stop your smile.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in it's slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

If you want my opinion . . .” Brooke said, lifting a decanter of whiskey. “I don’t.” Brooke, of course, was undeterred. To the contrary, a keen anticipation lit his eyes. The man possessed a cutting wit, and used it to draw blood. Some gentlemen angled trout while on holiday; others shot game. Arthur Brooke made it a sport to disenchant— as though it were his personal mission to drive fancy and naiveté to extinction. He said smugly, “My dear Mrs. Yardley, you have assembled a lovely collection of words.” Portia eyed him with skepticism. “I don’t suppose that’s a compliment.” “No, it isn’t,” he answered. “Pretty words, all, but there are too many of them. With so many extravagant ornaments, one cannot make out the story beneath.” “I can make out the story quite clearly,” Cecily protested. “It’s nighttime, and there is a terrific storm.” “There you have it,” Denny said. “It was a dark and stormy night.” He made a generous motion toward Portia. “Feel free to use that. I won’t mind.” With a groan, Portia rose from her chair and swept to the window. “The difficulty is, this is not a dark and stormy night. It is clear, and well-lit by the moon, and unseasonably warm for autumn. Terrible. I was promised a gothic holiday to inspire my literary imagination, and Swinford Manor is hopeless. Mr. Denton, your house is entirely too cheerful and maintained.” “So sorry to disappoint,” Denny said. “Shall I instruct the housekeeper to neglect the cobwebs in your chambers?” “That wouldn’t be nearly enough. There’s still that sprightly toile wallpaper to contend with— all those gamboling lambs and frolicking dairymaids. Can you imagine, this morning I found myself humming! I expected this house to be decrepit, lugubrious . . .” “Lugubrious.” Brooke drawled the word into his whiskey. “Another pretty word, lugubrious. More than pretty. Positively voluptuous with vowels, lugubrious. And spoken with such . . . mellifluence.” Portia flicked him a bemused glance. He added, “One pretty word deserves another, don’t you think?

OLD MARX He can’t think. London is damp, in every room someone coughs. He never did like winter. He rewrites past manuscripts time and again, without passion. The yellow paper is fragile as consumption. Why does life race stubbornly toward destruction? But spring returns in dreams, with snow that doesn’t speak in any known tongue. And where does love fit within his system? Where you find blue flowers. He despises anarchists, idealists bore him. He receives reports from Russia, far too detailed. The French grow rich. Poland is common and quiet. America never stops growing. Blood is everywhere, perhaps the wallpaper needs changing. He begins to suspect that poor humankind will always trudge across the old earth like the local lunatic shaking her fists at an unseen God.

Being fat doesn’t make me different. Fuck, I look like America. But loving that I’m fat makes me a Pillsbury rebellion. I hold protests in my mouth every time I eat in public. Picket signs wallpaper my willing body when I dance naked in my apartment. Riots Not Diets is tattooed across my chest. And I live for the moment when I shock you into silence. Because being me is fucking political. And you never voted for this shit.

I’ll write you a note a day,” Peter says suddenly, with gusto. “That’ll drive her ass crazy.” I write down, Peter will write Lara Jean one note every day. Peter leans in. “Write down that you have to go to some parties with me. And write down no rom coms.” “Who said anything about rom coms? Not every girl wants to watch rom coms.” “I can just tell that you’re the kind of girl who does.” I’m annoyed that he has this perception of me, and even more annoyed that he’s right. I write, NO DUMB ACTION MOVIES. “Then what does that leave us with?” Peter demands. “Superhero movies, horror movies, period films, documentaries, foreign films--” Peter makes a face, grabs the pen and paper from me, and writes down, NO FOREIGN FILMS. He also writes, Lara Jean will make Peter’s picture her phone wallpaper. “And vice versa!” I say. I point my phone at him. “Smile.” Peter smiles, and ugh, it’s annoying how handsome he is. Then he reaches for his phone and I stop him. “Not right now. My hair looks sweaty and gross.” “Good point,” he says, and I want to punch him. “Can you also write down that under no circumstances can either of us tell anyone the truth?” I ask him. “The first rule of Fight Club,” Peter says knowingly. “I’ve never seen that movie.” “Of course you haven’t,” he says, and I make a face at him. Also: mental note, watch Fight Club.

She lives in the coolest house. It’s really big and super modern. They even have a spa bath in the bathroom as well as a jacuzzi out by the pool. We talked about spending time sunbathing in her backyard as soon as the weather was warm enough. The lounge chairs that were scattered around the sides of the pool were so inviting that I had to try them out. Then when I found that they reclined right back, I lied there picturing myself during the summer months, just relaxing by that beautiful sparkling pool. Sara is so lucky! She seems to have pretty much everything a girl could wish for. Her bedroom has the prettiest pink wallpaper with a gorgeous white flower print as a feature wall. And her furniture is all white. She has a huge comfy bed with matching bedside tables. I’ve never known a girl our age to have a queen sized bed though. Even my parents only have a double bed and Sara’s bed seems enormous in comparison. The two hot pink chrome lamps that sit on her bedside tables are the coolest design and I just love the fluffy pink rug that spreads across the middle of her floor. And she even has

Spiderman: Hey, Ms. Marvel, watch the wings! They're sharper than they -- Kid's Frozen. Probably Never Faced Anything Like This Before. Gotta Snap Her Out Of It. But How -- Ah. Got It. Spiderman: Hey! You know my "Slingshot" Maneuver? The one I've done with Captain Marvel a few times. Ms. Marvel: F-Fuh Four Times! All her fans love it! You did against the Spider-Slayer's insect army, and when you fought Terminus...that was SO cool! I made it my wallpaper! Spiderman: Great! 'Cause we're doing it now! Ms. Marvel: With ME? I-- I-- Ms. Marvel: I'm doing it! I'm totally doing the Captain Marvel Slingshot Maneuver! Ms. Marvel: This is the BEST DAY EVER!

Yellow wallpaper covered every wall, and the daffodils on the china pitcher and bowl matched the color perfectly. An embroidered quilt covered the bed, varying squares of yellow made up the design. “It looks like a daffodil threw up in here,” Emma said. Sophie giggled. “I know what you mean. It’s a little over the top, but I still love it.

I appreciated the details of his bathroom. A marble sink set upon Gucci Heron wallpaper, a small book case painted a money green color sat right above his garden tub with lamps on either side, a tray with cigars crossed over the tub. I could tell that he relaxed in this tub a lot and read books which was sexy to me. I loved an educated man. The whole bookcase built into the wall theme was different. I could picture myself soaking and reading one of my favorite urban books.