Charissa Risher > Charissa's Quotes

“Here’s a story that helps her tie the “bunny ear bow” exactly the same way every time.”
― Sybrina Durant, Cleo Can Tie A Bow: A Rabbit and Fox Story

“But, if we consider, as physicists now claim, that everything is energy—everything we see, everything we think, everything we do—then it is just possible that this same law of conservation of energy applies to questions of morality. A conservation of moral energy, a maintenance of equilibrium… a balance exists and must be preserved. If an action is taken that disrupts that balance, then an action similar in kind and degree is required to restore equilibrium.”
― J.K. Franko, Eye for Eye

“From the antique Persian rugs covering the gleaming hardwood floors to the molded tin ceilings and ornate chandeliers, the house was a showstopper. Throughout its long life, no one had allowed this home to fall into disrepair. Every detail of the wainscoting, every pocket door, every window, floor tile, and bathtub was original to the house.”
― Kirsten Fullmer, Trouble on Main Street

“A mark was on him from the day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“I wish the night would end,
I wish the day'd begin,
I wish it would rain or snow,
or the wind would blow,
or the grass would grow,
I wish I had yesterday,
I wish there were games to play...”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.”
― John Green, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

“And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“You must forgive them, my child. Forgiveness is a part of penitence.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Phantom of Manhattan

“All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise.”
― Anne Brontë

“Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem - my chronic inability to astonish myself.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“Almondine

To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.

He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.

Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.

And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.

Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him.

"ory of Edgar Sawtelle"

As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.

And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“As I lay in bed, I experienced continual, yet gentle, throbbing throughout my face, but most pronounced directly under my eyes. At one point, around 1 a.m., I felt a build-up of pressure in my left eye, then a release. It was followed by quite a bit of crusty discharge. Suddenly, my eyes feel living—rooted.”
― Traci Medford-Rosow, Unblinded: One Man's Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight

“All of flying is easy. Just takes learning. Like everything else. Like everything else.”
― Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

“Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn’t even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don’t think that time passes or that from the day we are born we’re all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist

“The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines--the closer to really beginning to act, in short--the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"--that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself--the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance.”
― Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing

“Levamos para o casamento uma infinidade de expectativas ro- mânticas. As vezes, também visões de míticos êxtases sexuais. E impomos à nossa vida sexual muitas outras expectativas, muitos outros "devia ser", que o ato quotidiano do amor não consegue realizar. A terra devia tremer. Nossos ossos deviam cantar. Fogos de artifício deviam explodir. O ser consciente — o eu — devia ser queimado na pira do amor. Devíamos alcançar o paraíso, ou um fac-símile razoável. Nós nos desapontamos.”
― Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow

“We stumble into our graves knowing so well how to have done better.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Night of the Aurochs

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“[Harriet] hated math. She hated math with every bone in her body. She spent so much time hating it that she never had time to do it.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

“I ain’t need no proof of puberty at fucking six o'clock on a Wednesday morning.”
― Lawrence Hill, The Illegal

“And like: “Why should one want to wake up dead anyway?” If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have . . . if our grand and exhilarating Fight of Life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after—then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“down Cambridge road through the bushes on Charlestown Common a scurry of red ants. Had he really seen them or imagined them? But all about him people were exclaiming, ‘Look, there they are!’ Those red ants were British soldiers. To his left the last moment of sunset light was dying. The day had been amazingly warm, but with night a fresh breeze came up off the ocean. Lights began to glimmer in Charlestown and on warships. Seemingly there was nothing more to be seen from Beacon Hill. Silently people turned to go to their houses. ‘Look!’ Johnny cried. You could see the flash of musket fire, too far away to be heard. Fireflies swarming, hardly more than that. –4– Getting”
― Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“felicidad... ¡Me olvidará!... ¡Le amarán... porque lo merece, y amará! ¡Qué desgraciada soy!...”
― Stendhal, Rojo y Negro

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“...but once more I say do as you please, for we women are born to this burden of being obedient to our husbands, though they be blockheads”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote