Julia Stuart · 304 pages
Rating: (8.2K votes)
“For he was firmly of the conviction that the body was more susceptible to disease without the presence of love to warm the organs.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“Standing at the original Victorian counter was a man in a long black leather coat. His hair had been grown to counteract its unequivocal retreat from the top of his head, and was fashioned into a mean, frail ponytail that hung limply down his back. Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“Shrouded in his red cassock, he padded off to the bathroom lost in the silent ecstasy or wearing new socks.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“Valerie Jennings had clearly searched deep within her wardrobe for something suitably flattering, only to retrieve a frock of utter indifference to fashion. There had been an attempt to tame her hair, which seemed to have been abandoned, and the fuzzy results were clipped to the back of her head.
"You look nice," said Hebe Jones.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“Don't extend your feet beyond your blanket.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“A lucky person is one who plants pebbles and harvests potatoes.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“An old hen is worth 40 chickens. ~ Hebe Jones”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“Don't sprout where you haven't been planted.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“It was 1976.
It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience.
I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.
I didn't.
I raised my hand.
"Mrs. Shimmer," I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?"
The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles.
"You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough."
I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.”
― Laurie Notaro, quote from The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life
“I would not say no to a tortoise, I said.”
― Jessica Grant, quote from Come, Thou Tortoise
“All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
“In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is given exhaustively; leaving nothing in shadow, the gesture severs every parasitical meaning and ceremonially presents the public with a pure and full signification, three dimensional, like Nature. Such emphasis is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of a univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion, and without contradiction.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies
“I loved him. It was a painful realization - so painful that it took my breath away - discovering that I was totally in love with this man who would never love me back.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises
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