“There were never moments in your life when you actually saw something end, for whether you knew it or not something else was always flowering. Never a disappearance, always a transformation.”
“Faith was a choice. So, it followed, was wonder.”
“His curse in life was to be attracted to people who understood him.”
“Each piece of the set was on a winch and pulley, bag-dropped, counterbalanced by nests of fifty-pound bags of sand. The setup was called a "Fairbanks," for the reason that when a stagehand so wanted, he could stand upon a knot on the rope, untie as few or as many bags of sand as he wanted, and ride nearly to the rafters like Zorro as the scenery lowered.
There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter's team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalk and down to the stage again, simply because they could.”
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
“She knew him. Somehow. And wasn't that quite marvelous?”
“He thought of the boys and girls who looked for sweethearts at Mountain View Cemetery, and chorus girls who met their beaux behind scrim, and office romances that flourished in the buildings on Market Street, and he felt like there were little lights in alcoves here and there across the city, in cozy dens, in doorways during rainstorms, or even a chilly balcony on the Ferry building. Everywhere, little pairs of glowing lights. When you walked a city, wherever you looked, someone had probably fallen in love.”
“Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”
“Man cannot survive by bread and water alone, but bread and water and hate?”
“I’d spent so long pretending to be Scarlet that maybe the old Ivy had faded away.”
“The purpose of these children seems to be to congratulate the Pennypacks and to offer them a stray glove or scarf if one of the Pennypacks forgets theirs. These children are for parts. If she were interested in minions Madeleine would be a bully, but she doesn't like weak people hanging around.”
“Renown does not allure you now. What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? Moreover, happily there are too many of you for the weak memory of mankind to be able to retain your names.” “Of”
“When I asked him what he was planning to do in Canada, he didn’t have an answer. “I don’t care about myself anymore. I’ll go and clean the floors there. All I care about now is the future of my children.”
“the past would only fester and eat away at us if we tried to hold on to it too tightly.”
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