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
“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World
“On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude
“you were already more beautiful than anything I dared to dream. In our years apart, my imaginings did their best to improve on you perfection. At night, your face was forever behind my eyes. And now I see that that vision who kept me company in my loneliness was a hag compared to the beauty now before me.” –Westley
Enough about my beauty.” Buttercup said. “Everybody always talks about how beautiful I am. I’ve got a mind, Westley. Talk about that.”
― William Goldman, quote from The Princess Bride
“When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from The Little Prince
“Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, quote from The Secret Garden
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