Where The Sidewalk Ends Book Quotes

I'm Reginald Clark, I'm afraid of the dark So please do not close this book on me.

He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.

I love banned books. I used to read as many to you as I could when you were little, Mac.” “You read me banned books?” I say this sarcastically because I know he’s making it up. “Almost exclusively,” he answers—dead serious. “Charlotte’s Web and the poetry book by—uh—Silverstein—uh.” “Where the Sidewalk Ends?” I say. “And Reynolds—brave … uh …” “As Brave as You? No! How could anyone ban that?” “Yeah. And Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. Remember that one?” “I cried for a whole day.” Mom says, “Where the Wild Things Are. And Tango Makes Three. Melissa.” “Captain Underpants!” Grandad adds. “A lot of younger books you loved. I Am Rosa Parks,” Mom says. “And Last Stop on Market Street and Henry’s Freedom Box, and …” Grandad says, “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry!

Hester Lipp had written Where the Sidewalk Starts, an inexplicably acclaimed book of memoir, recounting — in severe language and strange, striking imagery — Lipp's childhood and adolescence on a leafy suburban street in Burlington. Her house was large and well-kept, her schooling uneventful, her family — the members of which she described in scrupulous detail — uniformly decent and supportive. Sidewalk was blurbed as a devastatingly honest account of what it meant to grow up middle class in America. Amy, who forced herself to read the whole thing, thought the book devastatingly unnecessary. The New York Times had assigned it to her for a review, and she stomped on it with both feet. Amy's review of Sidewalk was the only mean-spirited review she ever wrote. She had allowed herself to do this, not because she was tired of memoirs, baffled by their popularity, resentful that somehow, in the past twenty years, fiction had taken a backseat to them, so that in order to sell clever, thoroughly imagined novels, writers had been browbeaten by their agents into marketing them as fact. All this annoyed her, but then Amy was annoyed by just about everything. She beat up on Hester Lipp because the woman could write up a storm and yet squandered her powers on the minutiae of a beige conflict-free life. In her review, Amy had begun by praising what there was to praise about Hester's sharp sentences and word-painting talents and then slipped, in three paragraphs, into a full-scale rant about the tyranny of fact and the great advantages, to both writer and reader, of making things up. She ended by saying that reading Where the Sidewalk Starts was like "being frog-marched through your own backyard.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a café in Paris overlooking the Luxembourg Garden, just off of Rue Saint-Jacques. Rue Saint-Jacques is likely the oldest road in Paris, and it has a rich literary history. Victor Hugo lived a few blocks from where I’m sitting. Gertrude Stein drank coffee and F. Scott Fitzgerald socialized within a stone’s throw. Hemingway wandered up and down the sidewalks, his books percolating in his mind, wine no doubt percolating in his blood. I came to France to take a break from everything. No social media, no email, no social commitments, no set plans . . . except one project. The month had been set aside to review all of the lessons I’d learned from nearly 200 world-class performers I’d interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show, which recently passed 100,000,000 downloads. The guests included chess prodigies, movie stars, four-star generals, pro athletes, and hedge fund managers. It was a motley crew. More than a handful of them had since become collaborators in business and creative projects, spanning from investments to indie film. As a result, I’d absorbed a lot of their wisdom outside of our recordings, whether over workouts, wine-infused jam sessions, text message exchanges, dinners, or late-night phone calls. In every case, I’d gotten to know them well beyond the superficial headlines in the media. My life had already improved in every area as a result of the lessons I could remember. But that was the tip of the iceberg. The majority of the gems were still lodged in thousands of pages of transcripts and hand-scribbled notes. More than anything, I longed for the chance to distill everything into a playbook. So, I’d set aside an entire month for review (and, if I’m being honest, pain au chocolat), to put together the ultimate CliffsNotes for myself. It would be the notebook to end all notebooks. Something that could help me in minutes but be read for a lifetime.

BOOKS/AUTHORS ON THE BACKS OF LIBRARY CARDS #1 Miguel Fernandez Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert/ No, David! by David Shannon #2 Akimi Hughes One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss/Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger #3 Andrew Peckleman Six Days of the Condor by James Grady/ Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott #4 Bridgette Wadge Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume/ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling #5 Sierra Russell The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder/ The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin #6 Yasmeen Smith-Snyder Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne/The Yak Who Yelled Yuck by Carol Pugliano-Martin #7 Sean Keegan Olivia by Ian Falconer/Unreal! by Paul Jennings #8 Haley Daley Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm/ A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle #9 Rose Vermette All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor/ Scat by Carl Hiaasen #10 Kayla Corson Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames/Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein #11 UNKNOWN/CHARLES CHILTINGTON #12 Kyle Keeley I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt/ The Napping House by Audrey

I looked around the room. There were the turn-of-the-century bronze-and-silver vases and the old books with worn leather spines that I’d collected at flea markets. There were the Georgian maps I’d had framed, the Persian rugs, and the overstuffed leather armchair I liked to sink into at the end of the day. I’d tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live. But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk grate somewhere. I fretted about them, but I was embarrassed by them, too, and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy keeping warm and finding something to eat