Susan Vreeland · 434 pages
Rating: (6.5K votes)
“I've come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“At this stage of life, he'd better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“If you want to preach, young man, you ought to wear some kind of clerical costume so people would be warned. In my mind, there are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. I hate le misérabilisme. I’m in the shining business, not the darkening business.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within the tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kisses and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven's rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedge together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“One more thing. She wears Patchouli. Every tart in Montmartre wears it. Place Pigalle reeks of it. If she wants to carry out her pose as an aristocrat, she ought to refine her tastes.”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“life we can’t control, she thought. We must accept the cork we are and stay afl, and bob gaily when we can. She”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“How does one end a moment like this? It would kill her to feel him pull away. She had to be first. In a moment. One moment more. Yes. Now”
― Susan Vreeland, quote from Luncheon of the Boating Party
“All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.”
― Sarah Dessen, quote from What Happened to Goodbye
“It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, quote from Democracy in America
“I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep
“I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”
― David Sedaris, quote from Naked
“Never love that which you cannot keep.”
― Alexandra Adornetto, quote from Hades
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