“Mom said when she brought us beachcombing? She told us to always believe in something more. She told us to look at what was right in front of us, and we’d see that even a grain of sand was a miracle. That even a bit of glass was a message, that the universe was full of tricks and clues and signs.”
“She was aware of the two men in the room, both of them carrying their burden of history, their charms and flaws, their heaviness and guilt, for no adult was ever really without guilt of some sort.”
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea —e. e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”
“what was her life about? Did she mean nothing?”
“Perhaps every family is odd.” “You can’t build a straight house out of crooked wood, but you can build a very cozy crooked house,”
“Being a nanny is nothing like being a mother!” Sydney exploded. “You worry all the fucking time! Vigilance, intelligence, all your best intentions, none of that matters! It doesn’t stop when you go to sleep, it never stops! You are going to be so swamped if you take on Harry. You won’t sleep at night, you won’t know what to do when he gets sick, hell, you can’t even take him on a fucking carousel! It’s hard work, sometimes it’s hopeless and heartbreaking! You feel like you never get anything right! But look at you, you think you know how to be a mother!”
“This sister thing, Marina thought, is as complicated and incomprehensible as particle physics.”
“The waves had already washed away her footprints. But the tide had left something: a small creamy rock shaped like a heart, polished into a dull gleam by sand and water. Emma picked it up and held it in her hand. Her mother would say: The sea has given you a sign.”
“I officially declare the opening of the First Danielle Fox Memorial,” Abbie pronounced solemnly.”
“He comes where we are, and he brings us the life we hunger for. An early report reads, “Life was in him, life that made sense of human existence” (John 1:4). To be the light of life, and to deliver God’s life to women and men where they are and as they are, is the secret of the enduring relevance of Jesus. Suddenly they are flying right-side up, in a world that makes sense.”
“The fact is that there are two traditions of explanation that march side by side in the ascent of man. One is the analysis of the physical structure of the world. The other is the study of the processes of life: their delicacy, their diversity, the wavering cycles from life to death in the individual and in the species. And these traditions do not come together until the theory of evolution; because until then there is a paradox which cannot be resolved, which cannot be begun, about life. The”
“You're back early from Chicago," Jim remarked, seemingly oblivious to his friend's cold reserve. "I wonder why?"
"You know damned well why," Nick retorted grimly.
Jim's brows lifted, but he turned his tawny, appreciative gaze on Lauren. "I'd tell you how gorgeous you look,but at the moment,Nick is already restraining the urge to knock my teeth down my throat.
"Why?" Lauren gasped, her own gaze flying to Nick's granite features.
Jim answered with a chuckle. "It has something to do with two dozen red roses and a kiss he witnessed.He's forgotten about a girl I was in love with once but couldn't quite get up the nerve to ask to marry me. He got tired of waiting for me to bolster my courage, so he sent Ericka two dozen-"
Nick's breath exploded in laughter. "You bastard," he said good-naturedly, and this time his handclasp was sincere.”
“Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely,
does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious. A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal-which, in turn, allows them to be transferable. If one owes a favor, or one’s life, to another human being-it is owed to that person specifically. But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn’t really matter who the creditor is; neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing-as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude. One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest. If you end up having to abandon your home and wander in other provinces, if your daughter ends up in a mining camp working as a prostitute, well, that’s unfortunate, but incidental to the creditor. Money is money, and a deal’s a deal. From this perspective, the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic-and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The factor of violence, which I have been emphasizing up until now, may appear secondary. The difference between a “debt” and a mere moral obligation is not the presence or absence of men with weapons who can enforce that obligation by seizing the debtor’s possessions or threatening to break his legs. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes.”
“It's great having Bruce Springsteen on my show. We have so much in common! We're both from New Jersey, just from different neighborhoods. Sort of like how Martin Luther King and Margaret Mitchell both came from Atlanta. But from different neighborhoods.”
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