“See you soon,” I whispered. I bit my lip; and, in a moment of sheer abandon, I added, “I think I might . . . you know . . . love you, by the way.”
“Too,” Joshua whispered back groggily. “Love.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“Jillian,” I whispered, “I know you don’t know who I am. But I love your brother, and I know you do too. So . . . do you think you could wake up? Do you think you could at least try?”
For far too long she gave me no response. I’d just about given up—hung my head and prepared myself for the inevitable, impossible job of comforting Joshua—when Jillian whispered back.
“I guess. Since you asked so nicely.”
In spite of everything, a quiet laugh escaped my lips.
“Thank God. Because I have a feeling you’d be a huge pain in the ass if you died.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“Not the kind of unconsciousness that torments the dead, but the kind that kills the living.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“This is my first . . . ah . . .”
“Haunting?” he offered.
I snorted. “Yes, this is my first haunting.”
“Then I’m flattered.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“My sense of direction would be the death of me. Metaphorically, at least.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“Joshua?" I called out, a slight hitch in my voice.
"Yeah?"
"What do I look like to you?"
He tilted his head to the side, frowning.
"What do I look like to you?" I repeated urgently, afraid that if I didn't talk fast enough, I would have time to realize how absolutely, mind-bogglingly stupid I sounded.
Joshua smiled. He answered me, so quietly I almost couldn't hear him.
"Beautiful. Too beautiful for people not to have noticed you the other night.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“Hours can pass like years when you wait impatiently for something, especially something you crave and dread at the same time.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“I swear I’m not imaginary.” An uncontrollable grin spread across my face. “I would know if I was imaginary, right?”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“When he squirmed away from her, I felt the strangest mix of emotions. First, I wanted to jump into Joshua’s arms and give him a series of grateful kisses—rewards for his apparent disinterest in her. Next, I wished I was substantial enough to tackle this stranger and pull out her pretty hair”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“So . . . this means we’re buried in the same cemetery?”
He nodded, and then the tiniest smile crept over his features. When he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its bitter edge. “More proof that we’re fated to be together, don’t you think?”
“If that were the case, Eli, I’d have a whole graveyard full of choices, wouldn’t I?”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“My parents’ names are Rebecca and Jeremiah, by the way,” he whispered as I approached him.
I laughed, jittery. “Got it. So even though they’ll be too busy screaming at you, and they can’t hear me anyway, I’ll at least be able to address them properly?”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“I play DJ, and you tell me what you like.”
“Got it,” I said with a firm nod, fighting little jitters of excitement.
“And who knows? Maybe something will be familiar. As long as it’s not death metal, I think we can rule you out as a potential Satan worshiper.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“I guess a case of nerves could survive even death”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter where we go, because I just want to be whenever you are.”
― Tara Hudson, quote from Hereafter
“I drove back home. I missed her already.”
― Durjoy Datta, quote from Our Impossible Love
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Uljas uusi maailma
“MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011 Port St. Lucie, Florida First impressions are important, and in his first full meeting with us as the Mets manager, Terry Collins makes a really good one. We are in a conference room in Digital Domain Park. Everybody is there—Sandy Alderson, the new general manager, his assistants, the players, the coaches, the trainers, the clubhouse manager, and even our two cooks. We go around the room and introduce ourselves. Sandy speaks first. “The expectations for this club outside of this room are very low,” he says. “I know you guys expect more of yourself, and I expect more of you too.”Sandy is not a rah-rah guy, and his approach is low-key but very compelling. “The goal of any professional sports franchise is to win, and that’s why we’re here.” When he’s done, he turns the floor over to Terry, who says, “Sandy stole my speech.” Everybody laughs. Terry has no notes. He speaks from the heart. I’ve heard a lot of these first-day speeches, and believe me, it’s more common than not for them to seem formulaic, straight off boilerplate. This is not like that at all. Terry is intense, fiery, and enthusiastic. I never get the feeling he is saying things for effect. It seems so authentic, the way he makes contact with everybody in the room and jacks up the decibel level. Even when he dabbles in clichés—“We’re going to do things the right way”—you can’t help but feel his passion and energy. Terry is a small man and doesn’t have an imposing presence when you first see him, but he is powerful nonetheless. The essence of his talk is simple: “Everybody says we’re going to stink. I hear it over and over. I think they’ve got it all wrong. You want to come along as we prove them all wrong?” Terry talks for twenty minutes or so, and by the time he is done, all I can think of is: This is a guy I’m really going to enjoy playing for. CHAPTER THREE FAITH ON WALNUT Some kids are fighters. Other kids are scrappers. I am a scrapper. I spend two extremely scrappy years—fifth and sixth grades—at St. Edward School, and the trend continues into the seventh grade at Wright Middle School, where the kids are bigger and stronger than me, but not too many have less regard for their bodies. I don’t worry about pain or getting hit or getting knocked down. I just get back up and come back at you like a boomerang. My goal when I fight is simple: I want to give more than I receive. This doesn’t make me proud. It’s just what it takes to survive, and in seventh grade survival is what I’m all about. Fights aren’t an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood, but I seem to have more than my share of them. I fight to defend myself, to right a wrong, or to settle a dispute. I’m not picky. I figure out early that in a school where smoke billows out of the bathroom and pregnant girls walk the hallways, you don’t want people thinking you are wimpy. So I learn to act tough when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t need to—which gets me into trouble. In the lunchroom one day, I get up from my seat. You have assigned seats at Wright at lunchtime, and strict rules about leaving them, the school’s effort to prevent the cafeteria from turning into WrestleMania. But I need to get a homework assignment from a classmate, so I get up and walk across the lunchroom. A monitor corrals me and says, Get back to your seat. He’s kind of nasty about it. I don’t appreciate his tone. I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt. Now he doesn’t appreciate my tone. Come with me, young man. You are going to regret your garbage mouth. He’s right—I am going to regret it—because this is Tennessee in the mid-1980s and corporal punishment still rules the day. The monitor escorts me down to see Mr. Tinnon, the assistant principal in charge of paddling. He conveniently keeps the paddle by his desk.”
― quote from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball
“The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.”
― John Burnside, quote from The Dumb House
“His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.”
― Jane Gardam, quote from Old Filth
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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