“Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn’t there a kind of terrible beauty in it?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.
Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.
I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.
And my thunderbolt hit.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“There wasn't much to know. Now there's less.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“I found myself thinking of Potts as a tragic figure, a guy who'd been a happy towheaded kid you'd love to take fishing with you, who'd mistakenly invested in academic medicine when he'd have been happy in his family business, and who'd become a splattered mess on the parking lot of a hospital in a city he'd despised. What had been the seductiveness of medicine? Why?”
― Samuel Shem, quote from The House of God
“Because if I have a wicked stepmother and two evil stepsisters, aren't I supposed to get a prince?”
― Melissa Kantor, quote from If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where's My Prince?
“Do you think Gandhi was interested in Art?" I asked.
"Gandhi? No, of course not."
"I think you're right," I agreed. "Neither in art nor in science. And that is why we killed him."
"We?"
"Yes, we. The intelligent, the active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshiping the Brahman who is also Atman. It was intolerable. No wonder we bumped him off."
But even as I spoke I was thinking that that wasn't the whole story. The whole story included an inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the sub-human mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institution of the nation-state. He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity. But nationalism and the politics of power had proved too much for him. It is not at the center, not from within the organization, that the saint can cure our regimented insanity; it is only from without, at the periphery. If he makes himself a part of the machine, in which the collective madness is incarnated, one or the other of two things is bound to happen. Either he remains himself, in which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes unusable, reject or destroy him. Or he will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Ape and Essence
“The days, I can forget, baby doll. But the nights…” His voice dropped to a hoarse growl, filled with intense feeling. “The nights will be torture knowing I won’t have this for eternity.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from With Everything I Am
“Love knows not distance;
It hath no continent;
It's eyes are for the stars.”
― Lucinda Riley, quote from The Seven Sisters
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