“Her Pan-Cake makeup was cracking like a dried-out Dakota lake bed.”
― John Sandford, quote from Rules of Prey
“Don’t do that. Stay away.” She was on the edge of fear. “Was he stronger?” “No. He was softer. His hands were soft. And when I relaxed, he relaxed. That’s when I stamped on his instep.” “Where’d you learn that?” “From my ex-husband’s father. He taught me some self-defense things.” “Come here.” “No.”
― John Sandford, quote from Rules of Prey
“phone, twisted it out of her hand, and slammed it on the hook. “I cry good, don’t I?” she asked with a grin, and she was out the door. “Davenport, Davenport,” Daniel moaned. He gripped handfuls of hair on the side of his head as he watched Jennifer finish the broadcast. “ . . . called by some the smartest man in the department, told me personally that he did not believe that Smithe is guilty of the spectacular murders and that he fears the premature arrest could destroy Smithe’s burgeoning career with the welfare department . . .” “Burgeoning career? TV people shouldn’t be allowed to use big words,” Lucas muttered. “So now what?” Daniel asked angrily. “How in the hell could you do this?” “I didn’t know I was,” Lucas said mildly. “I thought we were having a personal conversation.” “I told you that your dick was going to get you in trouble with that woman,” Daniel said. “What the hell am I going to tell Lester? He’s been out there in front of the cameras making his case and you’re talking to this puss behind his back. You cut his legs out from under him. He’ll be after your head.” “Tell him you’re suspending me. What’s bad? Two weeks? Then I’ll appeal to the civil-service board. Even if the board okays the suspension, it’ll be months from now. We should be able to put it off until this thing is settled, one way or another.” “Okay. That might do it.” Daniel nodded and then laughed unpleasantly, shaking his head. “Christ, I’m glad that wasn’t me getting grilled. You better get out of here before Lester arrives or we’ll be busting him for assault.” At two o’clock in the morning the telephone rang. Lucas looked up from the drawing table where he was working on Everwhen, reached over, and picked it up. “Hello?” “Still mad?” Jennifer asked. “ You bitch. Daniel’s suspending me. I’m giving interviews to everybody except you guys, you can go suck—” “Nasty, nasty—” He slammed the receiver back on the hook. A moment later the phone rang again. He watched it like a cobra, then picked it up, unable to resist. “I’m coming over,” she said, and hung up. Lucas reached for it, to call her, to tell her not to come, but stopped with his hand on the receiver. Jennifer wore a black leather jacket, jeans, black boots, and driving”
― John Sandford, quote from Rules of Prey
“If you ever get in a situation where you need to shoot somebody, point the gun and keep pulling the trigger until it stops shooting. Forget about rules or excessive violence or any of that. Just keep pulling.”
― John Sandford, quote from Rules of Prey
“The discovery of a corpse's head on campus has worked as an expedient in getting the administrative staff to work before ten, despite the impending blizzard.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Size 14 Is Not Fat Either
“Wie ich höre, zeigt auch der Himmel eine Leidenschaft für das Neue. Ein Stern wird müde, ein Stern zu sein, und er explodiert und wird eine Nova.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, quote from Shosha
“There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.”
― Susan Fletcher, quote from Shadow Spinner
“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
“She looked over at him as he drove; he was grinning. “Why are you smiling?” she asked him. He turned to look at her. “I’ve never been shopping with a woman before,” he said. “I didn’t hate it.”
― Robyn Carr, quote from Shelter Mountain
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