Brando Skyhorse · 199 pages
Rating: (2.1K votes)
“The time between your first major fight with your best friend until you make up is, for a teenage girl, about as long as it took for God to create the universe. . . . It's excellent training for having a boyfriend.”
― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“[D]id you ever notice how friendships are a lot like pop songs? They are for girls, anyway. First there's the newness of it, the melody that streams into your head and makes you wonder ― will I like this song? Then come the vocals, what the song's heart truly sounds like, and with it the song's purpose, it's lyrics ― will they say something meaningful about my life? Will these words help me through a difficult time, or create a memory that will make me smile whenever I hear this song again?”
― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“There is no elegy for those who have been dispossessed of their anger--what remains is a future carved out of banality instead of blood.”
― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“Beat sprouts," I croaked, ashamed I'd reached a point in my life where I had to make decisions like choosing between bean sprouts or potato chips (and then going with fucking bean sprouts!).”
― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“an amaranthine valley of orange groves”
― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, quote from The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
“Had the memory worn thin? Had the debt he owed been paid? Had he discharged the last ounce of devotion? “There are worlds out there,” Andrew was saying, “and life on some of them. Even some intelligence. There is work to do.” He”
― Clifford D. Simak, quote from City
“When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' - DELLA VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne- Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the 'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis and Other Writings
“Men haven't changed: they love the thrill of the chase, and if you hand yourself over on a plate they'll lose interest.”
― Jane Green, quote from Mr. Maybe
“I don't think he could ever be a serial killer. He's way too shy. That Ted Bundy guy, he was pretty outgoing , from what I heard.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from When Lightning Strikes
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