342 pages
Rating: (4.9K votes)
“The sun was just coming up over the mountains--blood red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship.”
― quote from Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness
“Now I was going to be myself. I wasn't going to be hard to get along with or go out of my way to say anything mean, but from now on people were going to have to take me for what I was.”
― quote from Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness
“Are you too destitute to buy shoes Miss Winters?"
"What makes you ask?"
"I know the Indians are accustomed to wearing such footgear, but I've never seen respectable white women do so. They prefer shoes. From the rear I might have taken you for a squaw."
"Nobody asked you to look at my rear.”
― quote from Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness
“I never realized how much water a person used until I started packing it up from the creek---water for washing clothes, for washing yourself,for cooking,washing dishes. That’s all I seem to do all day is pack water and then dump it out.”
― quote from Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness
“After a while I found myself near Mary Angus' shack. It looked so lonely and forlorn I almost started to cry. For the first time I really understood why she was staying here, how even though she was sick she could keep on living in a space like that. If you loved somebody enough you could live anywhere.”
― quote from Tisha: The Wonderful True Love Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness
“Of course I saved you," she said. "I couldn't do without you." And because she was happy and flushed with magic, Holly leaned down and kissed Artemis, magic sparking around the contact like tiny fireworks.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Time Paradox
“He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited:
"O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow." She did not understand.
"It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother," he explained. "He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did."
"Was he a priest too?"
"A soldier," he said.
Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering.
"I am always in this state," he said.
And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask:
"And now?"
"And now nothing," he said. "It is enough for me that you know."
He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads.
Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me," she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: "What's the rest of it?"
"I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end," he said.
She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons
“It isn’t what you say that counts, it’s what you don’t say.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Paradise
“Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.”
― John Green, quote from Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances
“They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and it's essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer us - a stoical in the hedonism.”
― William Boyd, quote from Any Human Heart
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