Will Greenwood Quotes

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Most days I was impossible. Like a unicorn.

When I reached her, she was a star, pulling me into her orbit

You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out.

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me And tune his merry note, Unto the sweet bird's throat; Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather.

I love you. I love you all the way.

You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.

I'm concealing a lot of things. That's what a lady does.

I wanted a fairy tale ending for Wavy, because if she could find happiness, there would be hope for me, too.

Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire.

Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.

I liked to play at tragedy, but she drank it out of her baby bottle.

Had she been at all used to blushing, she would have blushed, but she wasn't, so she didn't.

I don't know why you're so hard to convince," I said, "But I'm really not that bad of a guy." "Spoken like a true serial killer.

Sometimes waiting and being disappointed was good, to remind me he didn't belong to me. Nothing belonged to me.

Phryne was getting out of the car. Dot closed her eyes. Miss Fisher was about to happen to someone again.

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.

Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, William,

I was lying on the tracks under a train I was in love with.

There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.

Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.

We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall. Piper

Ice cream was reliable. Young men were not.

There are only two precious things on earth: the first is love; the second, a long way behind it, is intelligence.

From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

...Each secret you carry has a weight all its own. They add up, secrets, to a burden you must carry all your days.

A young man in one’s hotel bedroom is capable of being explained, but a corpse is always a hindrance.

Girl that age ought not to have so many troubles, but she did. Looking at it that way, them two was about made for each other.

Nothing belongs to you. It didn’t matter that Grandma gave the cookbook to me. All Mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers.

I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.

Forgiveness is freedom. It's something you do for yourself - to keep who you are intact. Now that I think about it - in some ways, it's kind of a selfish act.

That’s the problem with the Christmas story: most of the roles are for boys. The only girl is there because men can’t have babies.

... with all the sweetness of a chocolate-coated razor-blade.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

That’s not the only thing love means. You just got your mind in the gutter.

I was moving forward into space, but i would never come home again

If you are not scared then there is no merit in being brave.

Life has no meaning but what we give it. I wish a few more of ye would give it a little.

He'd pull a door off its hinges rather than work out how to turn a key.

the secret to happiness is counting your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.

Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.

There aren't any normal lives, son. That's the lie that hurts us most.

Truth was she took care of him as much as he did her. There was a few times when he was younger that I thought to myself, One of these days, he ain’t gonna show up for work, ’cause he’ll be at home with a gun in his mouth. I had an uncle did that. Jesse Joe was a man with a deep streak of lonely, until Wavy came along.

What are you doing out there?" Lily hissed. "Would you believe me if I said I was just passing by?" She groaned. "You are a terrible liar, Calder White.

... I'm a half-empty kind of girl.

But a real vision, a real change, isn’t safe,” Maya said. “You don’t pay a workshop fee for it, you pay with your life.

Her heart was beating appreciably faster, and she took more rapid breaths, but she was enjoying herself. Adventuresses are born, not made.

She’s wrong. So fucking wrong. There aren’t a million Aveena Harpers out there. My angry girl. My pen pal. My Love. Just one.

I believe in absolutely nothing except yeast and the inevitability of politicians.

What if a family isn't a tree at all? What if it's more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought... what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they're invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.

Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.

I love you. I’ve loved you since the day I barbecued your babies and pushed you down the jungle gym just so I could kiss you.” He pauses, pain lacing his voice. “I fucking love you, Vee… And I’m paying for it.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.

How intimately a book is related to the tree and it’s rings, she thinks. The layers of time, preserved, for all to examine.

Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy's lips had been real cherries, probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

Why, you make anyone think that loving is a thing that can be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim.

Now you know, okay? From here on out, only you. I promise.

I love you, Wavy. I love you." I said it until she relaxed. "Now put your ring back on.

...why is it, she wonders...that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today?

the first Goddess, Gaia, who was the earth, wide hipped, big bellied, the womb of the human race, the nurturing breast of all humans, the opulent and voracious beginning of all things female.

There was no point in lying. "Yes. I am following you." Her carefully controlled exterior faltered. "Why?" "Because I like you. I'm sorry if that makes you nervous." All the color drained from her face. "I thought you thought I was crazy." "I like crazy." "You're unbelievable," she grumbled. "So I've been told.

Money can't buy happiness but it can vastly improve the quality of your misery.

Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.

After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.

How people will talk about one’s doings!” Fancy exclaimed. “Well, if you make songs about yourself, my dear, you can’t blame other people for singing ’em.

Tis my belief she’s a very good woman at bottom.” “She’s terrible deep, then.

«Fino a oggi non credevo nemmeno di possedere un cuore. Ora sei arrivato tu che riesci a farlo impazzire in un modo tutto nuovo, e io non so cosa fare per controllarlo. Perciò Logan Greenwood: esiste un antidoto per l'incantesimo con cui mi hai ammaliata?»

Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees...If only we had centuries. Maybe then there'd be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.

Now of old the name of that forest was Greenwood the Great, and its wide halls and aisles were the haunt of many beasts and of birds of bright song; and there was the realm of King Thranduil under the oak and the beech.

No cook can ignore the opinion of a man who asks for three helpings. One is politeness, two is hunger, but three is a true and cherished compliment.

I’d been going along thinking I was Shakespeare, but I’d written myself out of the play.

I couldn't say, "I lost the best thing that ever happened to me." Wasn't that punishment enough?

Amor fati: this is the very core of my being—And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!—To it, I owe even my philosophy.… Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of spirit, for it teaches one that vast suspiciousness which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X, i.e., the antepenultimate letter. Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time—forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity,—on which things we had formerly staked our humanity.

Summer had so many tricks. The nights lasted longer than the days, even though the angle of the Earth’s axis meant that was impossible. The night couldn’t be longer, but summer made it seem that way. Summer sneaked time for me, taking a minute from February, three minutes from English class in March, ten whole minutes from a boring Thursday in April. Summer stole time to give me another hour under the stars with Kellen.

How sad was it that grief had a shelf life, he thought. It’s only fresh and raw for so long before it begins to spoil. And soon enough, it would be replaced by a newer, brighter heartache - the old one discarded and eventually forgotten. 

Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household. “What shall I do?” cried Truth to the gods. “No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung.” “You are naked” said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. “No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories.” And she dressed Truth in Fable’s garments, and he was welcome at every house.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less. If I lay very still in bed at night, I remembered how Grandma’s house smelled. The taste of mint ice cream on Kellen’s tongue. Donal jumping on the bed to wake me up.

You can't find happiness outside yourself, Calder." I shook my head. "You sound like a fortune cookie." "It's still true. Everyone's always trying to do it, y'know. They try to get with the right people, hook up with the right guy, join the right club - without ever asking what 'right' is." "And this is somehow supposed to apply to me? I'm not some identity-confused sophomore, Lily. If you haven't been listening, I turn into a thieving, murdering fish.

Still, Temple has no illusions concerning her library's impact. Her books won't lift anyone from their low station. They won't right wrongs or save wandering souls from perdition or fill grumbling stomachs. But they might let a few scraps of sunlight fall into some lean, desolate lives. And that's something. 'The Greatest Library of Estevan, Saskatchewan

Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built, and there is something to that. It’s not enough, but it’s what he’ll take with him.

If it's true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary justice...then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip our the Earth's most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheaply to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again--that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

She rolled her eyes. " I was talking about your temperature, jerk. But just to be clear, I never said you weren't good-looking. If you remember, I said you made me nervous." "Right. So, you think I'm good-looking?" She swatted me over the head with her fedora, then went back to the cash register, saying, "You're really annoying. If you're sisters are pains in the ass, I'm thinking they learned it from you.

Come to the jacaranda tree at seven o'clock and you will hear something to your advantage. Destroy this note.' No signature, no clue to the identity. Just what sort of heroine do you think I am? Phryne asked the air. Only a Gothic novel protagonist would receive that and say, 'Goodness, let me just slip into a low-cut white nightie and put on the highest heeled shoes I can find,' and, pausing only to burn the note, slip out of the hotel by a back exit and go forth to meet her doom in the den of the monster - to be rescued in the nick of time by the strong-jawed hero (he of the Byronic profile and the muscles rippling beneath the torn shirt). 'Oh, my dear,' Phryne spoke aloud as if to the letter-writer. 'You don't know a lot about me, do you?

Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners-this is a basic requirement of most British institutions-and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal.

My own view is that everyone works too hard and too long and they ought to get out more. There isn’t time in their improverished lives to do anything creative, or even to just sit and stare, one of my favourite occupations. And how the wired-in young—never without their music, never out of touch because of mobile phones, constantly sharing everything, even pictures—are going to cope if they ever encounter solitude and silence is another thing.

One summer day I lay upon the grass. I’d sinned, no matter how, and in sin’s wake there came a kind of drowsy peace so deep I hadn’t even will enough to loathe myself. I had no mind to pray. I scarcely had a mind at all, just eyes to see the greenwood overhead, just flesh to feel the sun. A light breeze blew from Wear that tossed the trees, and as I lay there watching them, they formed a face of shadows and of leaves. It was a man’s green, leafy face. He gazed at me from high above. And as the branches nodded in the air, he opened up his mouth to speak. No sound came from his lips, but by their shape I knew it was my name. His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow him to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior’s face itself I saw.

Kira closed her eyes, thought, and said them aloud. "Madder for red. Bedstraw for red too, just the roots. Tops of tansy for yellow, and greenwood for yellow too. And yarrow: yellow and gold. Dark hollyhocks, just the petals, for mauve...." "Broom sedge," she added, still remembering. "Goldy yellows and browns. And Saint Johnswort for browns too, but it'll stain my hands. "And bronze fennel--leaves and flowers; use them fresh--and you can eat it too. Chamomile for tea and for green hues.

I like the color of the Caribbean." I paused and absorbed the warmth of her smile before adding, "Dogs, not cats. Boxers, not briefs. Redheads over brunettes..." I glanced sideways at her, and she met my gaze. "I have a penchant for girls in velvet jackets... and I think you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen." She choked in surprise, sputtered, and shook her head. "You see? This is what I mean." "What?" "Nobody talks like that. I barely know you." I was genuinely confused. Didn't girls like to hear this stuff? Besides, it was, conveniently enough, the truth. "Well, I talk like this. And you should be used to people telling you you're beautiful." "Well, I'm not," she said, and she sounded like she was getting irritated with me again. The feeling was mutual. I leaned against the wall and pulled up one knee. "Okay. I take it back. You are completely average. Dull, dull, dull. Unremarkable in every way.

So…” I start. “I… You wanted me to stop by?” Just so we’re clear, he’s still melting my insides with a single look, and I’m still a babbling idiot who can’t form a sentence. Xavier moves closer to me, a single whiff of his cologne enough to make my knees buckle. “No,” he shocks me by saying. My jaw hangs limply. “I wanted you to come and stay,” he corrects, and a herd of murderous butterflies assault my stomach. “Stay tonight?” He moves closer again. “Forever,” he says unapologetically. I avoid his gaze. “Xav, I—” “Don’t fucking go, Vee.” He cuts to the chase, cupping my face in his hands without a single thought as to the possibility of people seeing us. “I know this is shitty, and complicated, and it’d be easier for you to get on that plane, but… I don’t want easy—fuck easy. I want you. I love you, Vee,” he croaks, pressing his forehead flush to mine. “Just… stay.

On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later. Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced. Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully. Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes. Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? (Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A 1934 Symposium published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941; from Einstein's Out of My Later Years, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970, pp. 26-27.)

Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.