“If people really grew up, there would be no crime, no divorce, no Civil War reenactors....it's not like you think it will be, that one day you'll wake up and realize that you've got things figured out. You never figure it out. Ever." - Isabel Spellman attempting to explain growing up to her sister Rae”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“I'm staying," Henry said, annoyed.
"Why?"
"Because, if I leave, it would be like abandoning two mentally challenged people in a nuclear waste dump.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“Mrs. Chandler shouted after us, "And I hope that was all-natural food coloring you put on my dog!”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“If you have enough unanswered questions, you have a certifiable mystery, and those are impossible to resist.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“I tried not to think of Uncle Ray as being gone forever. I just liked to imagine him on one really long Lost Weekend.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“David, I just broke into your home. Clearly I don’t respect boundaries. Do you really think a verbal request is going to put a dent in any of my plans?”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“Your father and I haven't had this much quality time since our honeymoon."
"So what?"
"So, what if we can't stand each other?”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“I’m going to let you in on a secret. People don’t grow up like you think they do. The whole grown-up thing is a myth. Whatever’s wrong with you now will probably be wrong with you in twenty years. If people really grew up there would be no crime, no divorce, no Civil War reenactors. Think about it. Was Uncle Ray a grown-up? Does Dad always behave like a grown-up? It’s all bullshit. I can’t tell you what Mom’s been doing lately, but I will say, not grown-up… It’s not like you think it will be, that one day you’ll wake up and realize that you’ve got things figured out. You never figure it out. Ever.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
Lisa Lutz
Born place: in The United States
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“A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.
The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol.
...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies
“None of them even know who they are. They're just acting out their roles. Being what their parents made them. Always trying to be what's expected. It's exhausting.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises
“And truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism. When those in power intend to abuse that power, they look to an outside enemy in order to trick their people into pressing the means to their own abuse into the hands of the abusers. If an enemy does not exist, it will be manufactured, and all manner of horrors attributed to it, so that anyone who demands truth and accountability is set upon as being unpatriotic. And so that, when someone said to be an enemy is found, there will be few questions asked about guilt or innocence, and many faces averted when he is taken away.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Alta
“I wanted to be an artist, long time ago. But my hand was damaged, so I got into graphic design. Drawing faces was much easier with a mouse than a pen.”
― Karen Rose, quote from I Can See You
“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
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