“She turned the water scalding hot and scrubbed her face until it hurt, but the eyes still looked wrong. She tore off her clothes and stepped into the shower; but it was not enough.
The dirt was on the inside.”
― John Hart, quote from The Last Child
“Lightening falls, all you can do is- pray God that it doesn't fall on you.”
― John Hart, quote from The Last Child
“Disgust was an organ in Hunt's gut. The more he thought about it, the more it churned.”
― John Hart, quote from The Last Child
“For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.
But that's the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that's the way he rolled - his path, his choices, and no looking back.”
― John Hart, quote from The Last Child
“he was a little dark, a little private, Hunt was okay”
― John Hart, quote from The Last Child
“Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside.
Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried.
'This is embarrassing,' I admitted.
'It doesn't have to be.'
'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said.
The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter.
In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family.
I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“Looking back on it, could there possible have been a more confusing acronym for trying to keep kids from experimenting with drugs than DARE?
"Kids, we’re here today to DARE you not to do drugs! We DARE you to accept our DARE!"
"Office, does that mean you want us not to do drugs, or to do drugs?"
“We DARE you not to do drugs!”
"But I thought we weren’t supposed to do things We’re dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I should do that, right?"
"It’s just an acronym, son."
"What is an acronym?”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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