Page 13 Quotes

“Moreover, I wish to assure you both that I did not make any amorous advances on female monkeys.”
― Cassandra Clare, What Really Happened in Peru

“We do not want to comprehend that people may and do die of emotional pain, or to recognize the terror in ourselves when we cannot seem to help someone in despair -- when our words are empty.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones’s lost year. I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“The question was not whether the world would end but how soon the end would come.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“My son lives, she thought. My son lives and is... human. I knew he was... but... he lives. Now, I can go on living.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“He was still there. He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t have any place to go. In the whole world there was no place to go but this.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black

“But the harm went in deep. Deep, into places where it could never be gotten out again. Into places that, once they’re sick, can never be made sound again. Deep into the mind—into the reason.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black

“Some may be surprised to learn that there is this side to Professor Milner's life. But it is a mistake to believe that plain women are more or less celibate. The error is common, since in the popular mind - and especially in the media - the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“Setting aside Vogue, she unfolds the newspaper. Gradually, the leisurely Times style, with its air of measured consideration and its undertone of educated irony, begins to calm her, as the voice of an English nanny might quiet a hurt, overwrought child.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“If she couldn't look like an attractive woman, she could look like a lady”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“As a result men—even men she has been intimate with—do not now gaze upon her with dismay, as upon a beloved landscape devastated by fire, flood, or urban development. They do not mind that Vinnie Miner, who was never much to look at, now looks old. After all, they hadn’t slept with her out of romantic passion, but out of comradeship and temporary mutual need—often almost absent-mindedly, to relieve the pressure of their desire for some more glamorous female. It wasn’t uncommon for a man who had just made love to Vinnie to sit up naked in bed, light a cigarette, and relate to her the vicissitudes of his current romance with some temperamental beauty-breaking off occasionally to say how great it was to have a pal like her”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“Some may be surprised to learn that there is this side to Professor Miner’s life. But it is a mistake to believe that plain women are more or less celibate. The error is common, since in the popular mind—and especially in the media — the idea of sex is linked with the idea of beauty.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“As has sometimes been remarked, almost any woman can find a man to sleep with if she sets her standards low enough. But what must be lowered are not necessarily standards of character, intelligence, sexual energy, good looks, and worldly achievement. Rather, far more often, she must relax her requirements for commitment, constancy, and romantic passion; she must cease to hope for declarations of love, admiring stares, witty telegrams, eloquent letters, birthday cards, valentines, candy, and flowers. No; plain women often have a sex life. What they lack, rather, is a love life.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“Since this is not phrased as a question, Vinnie is not obliged to respond, and does not.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“Again Vinnie agrees, but in such a way as to make it clear that she does not choose to converse.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“However long the flight, Vinnie always tries to avoid striking up acquaintance with anyone, especially on transatlantic journeys. According to her calculations, there is far more chance of having to listen to some bore for seven-and-a-half hours than of meeting someone interesting—and after all, whom even among her friends would she want to converse with for so long?”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“... but as the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. And, because of the particular problem which we set out to answer, this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense, be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children.”
― Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation