“Listen.” The voice is extremely loud, and I am forced to hold the telephone away from my ear.
“I don’t know who you are, or why you have Jack’s phone, but he is my boyfriend, and—”
Boyfriend? What is a boyfriend? Perhaps it is something like a beau.
“Is he engaged to you, then?” I hope not.
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Oh, what a relief. He is my true love, and you do not sound very nice.”
“What? Listen, you . . .”
And then, strangely enough, she calls me a female dog.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“True love would look a second time. True love would not be thwarted. True love would not accept no for an answer. He would search the world and certainly look again and again in every cottage until he finds you.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Your telephone! Your friend Travis is in it!”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“What are you, in love with her?" Travis says. "You're staring like an idiot."
The weird thing is, I think I am.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Talia: I was brought up to respect older people and peasants...not that you're...
Jack: (clears throat) Quit while you’re ahead
Meryl: Ahead? She just called mom and old peasant.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Who or what is an Ipod?”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I am a princess. I do not follow fashions--I make them.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Parents always forgive you. Like sometimes, you see parents on the news, and their kid just got busted for murdering a 7-11 clerk, and they're like, 'But my Bubba's a good boy. He'd never hurt a fly.' So I'm sure your parents would forgive you for whatever you did.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Is it enough to be a princess, when being a princess means nothing?”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Be careful, okay, when you go there. Talia was really scared of this Malvolia chick. She could be dangerous.”
“What’s she going to have—an assault weapon?”
“Worse,” I say. “She’s got magical powers.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love—true love—is something else.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“This is where he should say that he is in love with me, that I have changed his life and that he loves me for it. But he doesn't. Is it because he is shy? Or because he is too young to say such a thing? Or is it merely because he does not love me? The worst of it is, I am falling in love with him.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“What they don´t tell you about Europe is how completely lame it is.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Yeah, but where I come from, we have lights at night." "We do, too. They are called stars. They are quite romantic.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“True love would look a second time. True love would not be thwarted. True love would not accept no for an answer. He would search the world and certainly look again and again in every cottage in Euphrasia until he finds you.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I learned that it is possible to make conversation with anyone, if you figure out what they wish to discuss.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“To be worthy of a princess, you must face your dragon... Your greatest fear.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I am a prisoner of love.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I am living my death, little by little, each day.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“you desire to escape. I wish to run away. I thought we might help each other.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I wish to go with you, not as man and wife, but merely as friends, travel companions, the sort of happy-go-lucky chums about whom rollicking old ballads of the road are written.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“But sometimes it is just impossible to obey blindly. Sometimes a child must strike out on her own. A child cannot be a child forever”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Even in my time, we knew that men were not in
charge. Oh, they might bluster as if they were. But when it came down to it, we women bore much of the influence. Often, my father would make some grand pronouncement in the evening. And the next morning, he had changed his mind. After a while, I realized that it was my mother who had changed it, quietly, in the night.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Then Jack takes me in his arms, and although I am still distraught, I cannot help but notice how well I fit in them, my head perfectly right for the crook of his neck.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Sometimes, when one communicates with others, one produces results.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Then what is there for you? What is there for you if he does not love you?" Nothing.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“but now it all floods back—the euphoria of loving her, the agony that she's leaving, that i'll lose her”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I'm a better person when I'm with you. I don't want to stop being that person. I don't want you to go”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“I am a coward. I am a cowardly coward, full of cowardice.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from A Kiss in Time
“Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“I love you." she whispered into the rough wool of his sweater.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle
“It was heartfelt, it was heartbreaking. It was extreme joy, it was bone-crushing grief. It was fiery hot, it was icy-cold. It was true love sprouting... it was true love dying.
It's like we were both trying to hold onto something that was slipping through our fingers, and we didn't understand why.”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Thoughtless
“Salander was dressed for the day in a black T-shirt with a picture on it of E.T. with fangs, and the words I AM ALSO AN ALIEN. She had on a black skirt that was frayed at the hem, a worn-out black, mid-length leather jacket, rivet belt, heavy Doc Marten boots, and horizontally striped, green-and-red knee socks. She had put on make-up in a colour scheme that indicated she might be colourblind. In other words, she was exceptionally decked out.”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from The Millennium Trilogy
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