“Other than God’s grace, I don’t know. It was just there when I needed it, that’s all.” “You don’t know.” Mary shook her head in quiet amazement. “Well then, it’s a gift. That’s the only explanation.” In her heart Rachel was thrilled and terrified at being filled with a sense not her own. That Gott had given her that sense at the very moment when Emma needed her was indeed a gift.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Even the actual printing of the final draft fell to her, as her dat doubted that anyone could decipher his herky-jerky farmer’s hand. When she had finished, he signed it.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Not by power or might, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts,” he said. “A father is never prouder of his children than when they make him a little bit ashamed of himself.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Caleb shook his head. “No, they”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Pah!” Schulman spat, glowering. “I chased him off. Two days ago I found one of my peons sleeping in the barn when he was supposed to be working, and I woke him with a buggy whip. Pelao snatched the whip away from me and threatened me with it, so I ran him off. Good riddance. I never trusted him anyway. There’s nothing worse than an uppity Chichimeca.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“the horse in a stall and walked calmly over to the two of”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Their wagon crawled along over gently rolling humps and swells, generally following the dusty valley floor between and around a maze of overlapping ridges. Thin pine and oak forests covered the lower slopes but never quite reached the red-rock ridgetops. Nor were there many trees down in the dry valleys of prairie grass and sage, where the occasional stunted, wind-rustled corn patch of a mestizo farm huddled against the road, or the mangy dogs of a native village ran out to pester the horses. But even in the afternoon when the road began to climb, winding through gaps in the craggy mountains toward the town of Arteaga, Caleb noted that it was a much better and smoother road than the one from Agua Nueva.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“Jah – or at least I know about him. My father knew him well. They fought together at the battle of Zacatecas, the fiercest battle of the war. There is a rumor that my father fell because El Pantera abandoned him at the wrong time. My father, too, was a great warrior.”
― Dale Cramer, quote from Paradise Valley
“She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter.
The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself.
Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen!
You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world.
At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972.
A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'?
I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!"
They asked me to play the record over and over again.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“I can awaken things inside you that have been sleeping all your life. You're strong enough to live in the dark, to glory in it. You can become a queen of the shadows. Why not take that power, Elena? Let me help you take it.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle
“I don't know how to let you back in." My heart beat spiked and I closed my eyes when he whispered," I don't know how to keep you out either.”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Thoughtless
“Fantaseó con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina.”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from The Millennium Trilogy
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