“When an eighty-five pound mammal licks your tears away, then tries to sit on your lap, it's hard to feel sad.”
“It's safe to be in love with someone you know you'll never have. Nothing is really risked when you know you can't lose. He was a distraction, an excuse, and a friend. No more, no less.”
“I fold my laundry discretely, putting my jeans and tops on anything I don’t want the guys to see. I sneak a look at Malone every once in a while, and each time I do, he seems to know. Blushing becomes my permanent facial state. I pretend to watch the game, though the Sox could have all been murdered and left disemboweled on the field for all the attention I truly pay.”
“I stand up, trying to shake myself mentally. Get over him, Maggie, I instruct myself. I need to stop. I really do. I want to. I’m going to. I sound like a drug addict. Perhaps there’s a twelve-step program for me. Priest Lovers Anonymous.”
“Malone is surly, scary and ugly,” I say. “So I’m gonna pass on him, if you don’t mind.” “I don’t know,” Chantal says. She looks past me. “What do you say, Malone? Want to go out with Maggie?”
“Mrs. Plutarski is such a pill to me. You’d think I
routinely crapped on the altar, the way she treats me.”
“She did not feel anything so boring as beautiful. She felt fierce.”
“Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that.”
“Muttering something, Tant raised his hands to the sky as he walked beside me. I wasn’t sure if it was a prayer or curse, but I distinctly heard “Why me?”
“As it 'appens, I am Arthur's right-hand man," said Suzy. "Or left-hand girl, I can't remember where I stood last time. Anyhow, me and Arthur is like two fingers of a gauntlet. Or at least the thumb and the little finger. I mean, I'm his top General, and all. So if I say you're in, you're in.”
“At the same time, Herodotus sets himself a most ambitious task: to record the history of the world. No one before him ever attempted this. He is the first to have hit upon the idea. Constantly gathering material for his work and interrogating witnesses, bards, and priests, he finds that each of them remembers something different—different and differently. Moreover, many centuries before us, he discovers an important yet treacherous and complicating trait of human memory: people remember what they want to remember, not what actually happened. Everyone colors events after his fashion, brews up his own mélange of reminiscences. Therefore getting through to the past itself, the past as it really was, is impossible. What are available to us are only its various versions, more or less credible, one or another of them suiting us better at any given time. The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.”
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