“If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.”
“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
“There's no room for human rights in a government waiting room.”
“He could have had “dull” tattooed across his forehead, but that would have made him too exciting.”
“There is a class of tourists who never seem to see the things they're visiting, I thought. They prefer to look at directions to the next place they're not going to look at.”
“Only the French, I thought, could attain orgasm by listening to themselves. It was self-inflicted oral sex. A DIY blowjob.”
“Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.”
“Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors--however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.”
“Spanish, huh?" he said, glancing down at the scattered papers as he grabbed them. "Can you say anything interesting?"
"El tono de tu voz hace que queria estrangularme." I stood up and waited for him to hand over my papers.
"That sounds sexy," he said, getting to his feet and handing me the stack of Spanish work he'd swept together. "What's it mean?"
"The sound of your voice makes me want to strangle myself."
"Kinky.”
“No one has ever been able to pinpoint the trigger."
"But?"
"But it is legend that ambrosia only rises when-"
She held her breath.
"- an archangel loves true.”
“We’re not completely happy here because we’re not supposed to be! Earth is not our final home; we were created for something much better.”
“It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’ — or some such sally which I have forgotten.”
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