Page 14 Quotes

“The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Flowers for Algernon again? she asks. Doesn't that book always make you cry?
One day it won't, I say. I want to be sure to be reading it on that day.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Ombria in Shadow

“She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She was wearing a sleeveless smock, blue with little pale red flowers on it. Her shoulder-length, ash-blond hair was fastened with a clip at the back of her neck. Her bare arms were pale. Her gestures of lifting the iron, using it, setting it down again, and then folding and putting away the laundry were an exercise in slow concentration, as were her movements as she bent over and then straightened up again. Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind’s eye as she was then, she doesn’t have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it. High forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips that formed a perfect curve without any indentation, square chin. A broad-planed, strong, womanly face. I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Having commodified nature, we're eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb.”
― Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

“For him we were as good as dead; each of us was carrying around his own death certificate, from which only the date was missing.”
― Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

“some things you don’t want to know. Like why the girl you loved with all your heart kept saying no to you, but tumbled into bed with the new guy at almost the first opportunity. I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Jackie wasn’t just out of my league—we weren’t even playing the same sport.”
― Scott Von Doviak, Charlesgate Confidential

“And no harm could happen to her now, no harm such as had befallen that other poor unknown girl before; he’d taken care of that. As long as it wasn’t quite eight, she was still on her way. She’d stay alive all night now. She’d stay alive forever.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black

“It would always be eight o’clock now, on his watch, in his heart, in his brain.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black

“The house was two stories in height. It was of buff brick, with white trim about the windows and the doorway. It was not large, but it occupied an extremely advantageous position. It sat on a corner plot, so that it faced both ways at once, without obstruction. Moreover, the ground-plot itself extended beyond the house, if not lavishly at least amply, so that it touched none of its neighbors. There was room left for strips of sod in the front, and for a garden in the back.

It was not, of course, strictly presentable yet. There were several small messy piles of broken, discarded bricks left out before it, the sod was not in place, and the window glass was smirched with streaks of paint. But something almost reverent came into the man’s face as he looked at it. His lips parted slightly and his eyes softened. He hadn’t known there could be such a beautiful house. It was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. It was his.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness

“Mallory flashed the thin, quick humorless smile Blackstone had seen so often on television.”
― Charles McCarry, Shelley's Heart

“He stared at Mallory, who gave him a thin smile. Blackstone glanced at Mallory too, as if wondering how much more to say in his presence.”
― Charles McCarry, Shelley's Heart

“While the women washed dishes, I listened to Mom’s other voice, the one she used with her friends. With them she seemed happier. Funny how the same person could be different people. This made me think that there were things about Mom I didn’t know, though she wasn’t mysterious like Mrs. Gustafson.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library