J.S.B. Morse · 423 pages
Rating: (44 votes)
“A broken heart is just the growing pains necessary so that you can love more completely when the real thing comes along.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“A pure heart is superlatively rare and even more attractive.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“It's a certain tragedy when agony and resentment are all you have left connecting you to someone you once loved.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“If you spend enough time with someone who doubts you, you can't help but believe them.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“You will never find the perfect person but you might be lucky enough to find someone who wants to be.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“People aren't crazy, they’re just reacting normally to an abnormally crazy world.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“If you live life so cautiously as to never fail, you end up failing at life itself.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“Some people are like singularities. Get close enough and you will be uncontrollably consumed in an infinite attraction and will cease to exist apart from them.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“That’s life. It’s a series of knock-down, drag-out fights with yourself and others that will leave you lying on the ground bruised and bloody and drooling all over your shag carpeting. But all that doesn’t define you, your reaction to it does. Your environment doesn’t make you who you are, your choices — your beliefs, do.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“Change is inevitable. If you don’t seek it out, it will seek you out.”
― J.S.B. Morse, quote from Now and at the Hour of Our Death
“But the guarding of our desires is more than fighting a rear-guard defensive action against temptations from the world, the flesh, and the devil. We must take the offensive. Paul directs us to set our hearts on things above, that is, on spiritual values (Colossians 3:1).”
― Jerry Bridges, quote from The Pursuit of Holiness
“He looks at me fondly. I know that the look doesn’t have love in it. Or even lust. I still wonder about love or sex or lust. I saw lust in his eyes when he looked at that girl on the sidewalk … I love him, anyway. I love him because he’s kind to me and he doesn’t want my body, doesn’t want to feel me or touch me, like all the others … and maybe after a while he might look at me with more than fondness, will kiss me sweetly, tenderly.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Tenderness
“Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, quote from After You'd Gone
“in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night.”
― Colm Tóibín, quote from Brooklyn
“We get in and I start the car. “Are you going to be good to Lani?” I ask. I think of Tommy Cook, a pale boy with psoriasis; we used to tie him to a chair with bungee cords and put him in the middle of the road, then hide. Few cars would actually come down Rainbow Drive, but when they did, it always surprised me that the drivers would slow their vehicles and swerve around the chair. None of them ever got out of their cars to help Tommy; it was as though they were in on the prank. I don’t know how Tommy managed to let us catch him more than once. Maybe he liked the attention.
“I’ll try,” Scottie says. “But it’s hard. She has this face that you just want to hit.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of Tommy, but realize I’m not supposed to empathize. “What does that mean?” I ask. “The kind of face that you want to hit. Where did you get that?” Sometimes I wonder if Scottie knows what she’s saying or if it’s something she recites, like those kids who memorize the Declaration of Independence.
“It’s something Mom said about Danielle.”
“I see.” Joanie has carried her juvenile meanness into her adult life. She sends unflattering pictures of her ex-friends to the Advertiser to put in their society pages. She always has some sort of drama in her life, some friend I’m not supposed to speak to or invite to our barbecues, and then I hear her on the phone gossiping about the latest scandal in an outraged and thrilled voice. “You are going to die,” I’ll hear her say. “Oh my God, you will just die.”
Is this where Scottie gets it? By watching her mother use cruelty as a source of entertainment? I feel almost proud that I have made these deductions without the blogs and without Esther, and I’m eager to tell Joanie about all of this, to prove that I was capable without her.”
― Kaui Hart Hemmings, quote from The Descendants
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