“You know. Life's short. If you don't try new things, you'll never know what you're best at. And you can only make time for new things by quitting the things you know don't work for you.”
“But I guess you would look beatific, too, if the man you had been in love with since the fifth grade had told you that he was in love with you, too.”
“The fact that he was willing to sacrifice his own face in order to keep mine from getting bashed in”
“I was in love with Scott Bennett. That I had been in love with him my whole life, practically.”
“We kissed all the way through the fireworks display. We didn’t even notice that there was a fireworks display… …I guess because we’d been making fireworks of our own.”
“Because my heat was too full of appreciation for what my friends-- my real friends-- had done for me.”
“She'd realize Steve was her soul mate and that she would never love anyone as much as she loved him.”
“I thought if you wore that, no matter what face you saw every morning in the mirror," he said in his deep voice, "you'll never forget who you really are."
My eyes filling with tear, I held my hand out across the tabletop. He grasped my fingers, his grip strong and reassuring.
"As if I ever could," I said, my voice clogged with emotion, "with you around to remind me.”
“What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I said. Because nothing was wrong. For the first time in my entire life, it seemed, everything was suddenly, fantastically right.”
“You know. Life’s short. If you don’t try new things, you’ll never know what you’re best at. And you can only make time for new things by quitting the things you know don’t work for you.”
“I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.”
“Goddamn woman has me on an invisible line. Like she’s cranking the reel and tightening the hook in my mouth before I even have a chance to taste the fucking bait.”
“My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.”
“Yeah, you're fucked up, baby." He smiled a little and kissed Fen again. "'S part of what I love about you.”
“because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.”
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