Gary D. Schmidt · 219 pages
Rating: (8.2K votes)
“Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.”
“The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted...everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.”
“Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?"
"Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.”
“(The raindrops) played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on pale yellow.”
“The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on.”
“At the happy ending of the Tempest, Prospero brings the kind back togeter with his son, and finds Miranda's true love and punishes the bad duke and frees Ariel and becomes a duke himself again. Everyone - except Caliban - is happy, and everyone is forgiven, and everyone is fine, and they all sail away on calm seas. Happy endings.
That's how it is in Shakespeare.
But Shakespeare was wrong.
Sometimes there isn't a Prospero to make everything fine again.
And sometimes the quality of mercy is strained.”
“This wrong doubtful body should not have been mine. Mine was. Not this. Was perfect. Once. Drag the. I will and sit and drown if the. Come water. Over land. Swallow up. Swallow me down. Drag me in the gullys. In the pipes please and the drains.”
“Part of living is accepting you do not control everything.”
“He looked up as Tristan reached him. No doubt he had tears mixed with the rain sliding down his face. “It’s my birthday,” he whispered. “That’s when he gave me the queen. He said it’s because I was the strongest person he knew.”
“Not knowing one’s weaknesses gets people killed.”
“He would have denied it, even to himself -deemed it a laughable affectation- but it seemed to him now that he had always secretly believed that in the way he lived (he refused to say his "lifestyle"), in his freelance, un-health-insured, sparsely thinged life, he was in a small way registering a rejection-of conformity, of middle-class convention, of not just acquisitiveness but enslavement to the idol of "security." Nevertheless, he'd wound up in the same place as everyone else. Was this - latte liberalism - his inescapable fate? Surely it was. It was sheer vanity to pretend otherwise.”
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