Kathleen Baldwin · 352 pages
Rating: (3K votes)
“And I learned all those many years ago to stop listening to what people said, and listen instead to what they mean. Some people speak with honey and intend to serve us poison. You, my lord, speak with thorns but yearn for cake.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“Joy means so much more when shared with you.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“"You're here because you're odd. Exceptional Unrelenting, Jane followed me to the edge of the circle. "You're unusual, Georgiana. And that is far more dangerous than any fire." ”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“Why must people always assume we moderns knew more than any of the previous cultures? It simply isn't true, evidence proves otherwise.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“I wasn’t certain Sebastian’s teasing was the same. It felt different somehow. Sera clarified, “That’s the way men are.” Jane”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“I picked up a small square shortbread biscuit and stared at it, noting the uneven angles, wishing it were a perfect square, but it was, after all, merely a baked good, and baked goods did not ordinarily form perfect squares.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“I don't budge, accepting my fate, thankful that for a brief moment in my life I had the opportunity to discover what life was all about: the ability to love; the courage and strength it takes to love a person, no matter how different they are. Forgiving that they have flaws and appreciating their imperfections. Knowing those are the things that define them, forming them into something that cannot be defined and shelved into a category. Understanding that's what makes them so remarkable.”
― quote from Becoming Noah Baxter
“Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“She felt like a baton getting passed along in a relay race, completely devoid of any control over her destiny.”
― Gretchen McNeil, quote from Possess
“We all know the elementary form of politeness, that of the empty symbolic gesture, a gesture-an offer-which is meant to be rejected. In John Irving's A Prayer for
Owen Meany, after the little boy Owen accidentally kills John's-his best friend's, the narrator's-mother, he is, of course, terribly upset, so, to show how sorry he is, he discreetly delivers to John a gift of the complete collection of color photos of baseball stars, his most precious possession; however, Dan, John's delicate stepfather, tells him that the proper thing to do is to return the gift. What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the "magic" of symbolic exchange, is that, although at the end we are where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity. And is not something similar part of our everyday mores? When, after being engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with my closest friend, I win, the proper thing to do is to offer to withdraw, so that he will get the promotion, and the proper thing for him to do is to reject my offer-in this way, perhaps, our friendship can be saved....
Milly's offer is the very opposite of such an elementary gesture of politeness: although it also is an offer that is meant to be rejected, what makes hers different from the symbolic empty offer is the cruel alternative it imposes on its addressee: I offer you wealth as the supreme proof of my saintly kindness, but if you accept my offer, you will be marked by an indelible stain of guilt and moral corruption; if you do the right thing and reject it, however, you will also not be simply righteous-your very rejection will function as a retroactive admission of your guilt, so whatever Kate and Densher do, the very choice Milly's bequest confronts them with makes them guilty.”
― Slavoj Žižek, quote from The Parallax View
“the value of work? Have I taught them self-reliance? Have I taught them to take care of each”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Codex
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