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Sage

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“He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything.
After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me.
Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’
‘That was him.’
Jake shakes his head.
‘What?’
‘He’s not for you,’ he says.
I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know?
‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’
Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

12 likes

“Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.
‘No, not summer camp,’ Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp, and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

6 likes

“By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

3 likes

“A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard’s twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly misunderstood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

7 likes

“It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one.
It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.”
― Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

1 likes

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