“She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.”
“The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else--grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.”
“That was the trouble with this house. A girl couldn't even carry on a telephone conversation with any privacy”
“Once more Jane sat staring at the telephone. This time she was filled with a confidence that was new to her. Stan Crandall. Stanley Crandall. He liked her! He had seen her once, and even though had been rumpled and grass-stained and having a terrible time with Sandra, he liked her well enough to go to the trouble of finding out her name and calling to ask her to go to the movies. Jane smiled at the telephone and gave a sigh of happiness”
“She was surprised to feel his hand on her arm and still more surprised-almost unbelieving-to see his fingers unclasp his identification bracelet and remove it from his arm. Silently he fumbled with the bracelet and slipped it around her right wrist. with a tiny click he snapped the clasp shut. Jane gave a gasp of astonishment and turned questioning to Stan. She was wearing his identification bracelet! The silver links on her wrist were still warm from his arm”
“He would be atleast sixteen-old enough to have a driver's licence- and he would have crinkles around his eyes that showed he had a sense of humor and he would be tall, the kind of boy all the other girls would like to date”
“If they had been riding in a car, she would have waited for him to go around and open the door for her, but riding in a truck is different”
“Well, she thought, I'm certainly bright. She had wanted to meet a new boy and when she finally did meet one she didn't even find out his name”
“Oh well, thought Jane, that's how men are. He's probably taking it for granted. She found it very pleasant to be taken for granted by Stan”
“I know this is probably sort of sudden." The boy hesitated. "But I was wodnering if you would care to go to the movies with me tomorrow night.”
“Fruit fly scientists, God bless ‘em, are the big exceptions. Morgan’s team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like ‘speck,’ ‘beaded,’ ‘rudimentary,’ ‘white,’ and ‘abnormal.’ And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The ‘turnip’ gene makes flies stupid. ‘Tudor’ leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. ‘Cleopatra’ can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, ‘asp.’ ‘Cheap date’ leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the “POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic” gene in mice—‘pokemon’—nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the ‘pokemon’ gene (now known, sigh, as ‘zbtb7’) contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn’t want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors.”
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
“As much as I love teamwork, for this game, you all need to fly solo, like Han in Star Wars, although he always had Chewbacca in the copilot seat. But that is neither here nor there, because it is in a galaxy far, far away. Play on, Olympians.”
“come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.”
“He shifts enough to bring us closer, and the rock gently rolls. His tender gaze strokes my face. “You are my rock.” He squeezes my hand the way I squeezed his on the soccer field at Newtown High.”
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