Simone Elkeles · 234 pages
Rating: (9.8K votes)
“And my piece of advice is...don't flirt with any of the female instructors. They all have access to weapons bigger than yours.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“Sometimes we have to prove to others we're strong even where we're not.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“Believe me, I know people who have doting Grandmas. Jessica's Grandma Pearl spent four years knitting her a blanket. Four years! And she's got arthritis. I wonder what Grandma Pearl would think if she knew Jessica lost her virginity to Michael Greenberg under the blanket she spent four years knitting with her crooked fingers.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“The threat of taking something away makes us appreciate it more.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“The end of one thing is just the beginning of another.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“You can run from some problems, but then you get caught up in others.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“—Ser judía es más algo de tu corazón que de tu mente. Para algunos, ser judío es seguir estrictamente las leyes y las costumbres de nuestros antepasados. Para otros, es ser parte de una comunidad. La religión es muy personal. Siempre estaré allí para ti si quieres o lo necesitas. Puedes elegir adoptar el judaísmo o decidir que tu vida no lo necesita. Nadie puede imponer la religión en ti o ésta no será real.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin a Summer Vacation
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.”
― Carson McCullers, quote from The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
“You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, quote from Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
“Appearance, after all, was a reflection of what a person thought of themselves and therefore, by extension, of others.”
― Terry Goodkind, quote from Chainfire
“If you're single, then I'm single?" What's that supposed to be? Lyrics to a pop song?”
― Sophie Kinsella, quote from Shopaholic Takes Manhattan
“Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Saturday
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