“Princesa came to rancho one day after her owner no want her. Says too much horse for him, too wild. But he's wrong. She's not wild, she's spirited. 'Wild' means 'I no care about what I do.' But 'spirited' means, 'I love what I do.' Big difference.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“Maybe what matters is not so much the path as who walks beside you.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“West looks up. 'This is the best time to hunt, when the animals are out looking for their suppers. 'Course, with a painted sky, light's not always good.' I never heard someone call the sky painted before, but it's the perfect word. Clouds outlined in gold streak across the firmament, casting uneven shadows over the landscape.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“no one ever injured an eye by looking at the bright side.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“Maybe life just tastes sweeter after you’ve licked death.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I pat my mule's neck and find comfort in the silky tufts of her mane. Father told me not to brood when people judged me for my wrapper, not my filling, or I would spend my whole life in the steamer.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“You miss being a girl? I ask her.
Not as much as I thought I would. Just feels like when I'm being a boy, I can cut a wider path.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“Your head’s like a room and when you’s forced to stay in it, you gotta deal with all the trash that’s left in there.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“Just like life.” “What?” “The clouds. They never hold still. Sometimes you think you’re seeing one thing, and a second later, the whole picture changes.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I don’t understand the constant need to prove one’s manhood, as if it is always on the verge of slipping away. We never need to prove our womanhood.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I kiss him good-bye in my head, bidding farewell to the one I have loved in silence.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I bet those boys bit their way out of the womb,” Andy whispers.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“My showmanship only comes out when I hold the violin—with Lady Tin-Yin in my arms, I don’t care who watches. A peace comes over me, something I call my violin calm.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“There's a Chinese principle called yuanfen, which means your fate with someone else [...] Two people with strong yuanfen have a greater chance of meeting in their lifetimes, and can become as close as family.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“We carry around the light of our loved ones who have passed. It is they who light the path for us.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“You ever think about the noose?'
'I been thinking about the noose since I was born.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“We carry around the light of our loved ones who have passed. It is they who light the path for us.” “Passed?”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I mean, sometimes I wonder why God would grant a favor if trouble's just waiting around the corner? It feels disingenuous. If it's fate, then it's written in the stars, and we can't do much to avoid it.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“You want my take, there’s nothing wrong with matching people up according to the stars, because at least someone gave a thought to it. Lots of deuces leap the altar ’cause they like getting sacked, and lots of girls agree ’cause they think they got no choice. Ain’t fair to the human race, and that’s the short of it.”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
“I don’t understand the constant need to prove one’s manhood, as if it is always on the verge of slipping away. We never need to prove our womanhood. “You”
― Stacey Lee, quote from Under a Painted Sky
Stacey Lee
Born place: The United States
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“Happy and sad, elated and miserable, secure and afraid, loved and denied, patient and angry, peaceful and wild, complete and empty...all of it. I would feel everything. It would all be mine.”
― Stephenie Meyer, quote from The Host
“Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from The Woman in White
“I'd been convinced I was on the outside, but really, I'd always been within arm's reach. All I had to do was ask, and I, too, would be easily brought back, surrounded and immersed, finding myself safe, somewhere in between.”
― Sarah Dessen, quote from Just Listen
“This story takes place a half a billion years ago-an inconceivably long time ago, when this planet would be all but recognizable to you. Nothing at all stirred on the land except the wind and the dust. Not a single blade of grass waved in the wind, not a single cricket chirped, not a single bird soared in the sky. All these things were tens of millions of years away in the future.
But of course there was an anthropologist on hand. What sort of world would it be without an anthropologist? He was, however a very depressed and disillusioned anthropologist, for he'd been everywhere on the planet looking for someone to interview, and every tape in his knapsack was as blank as the sky. But one day as he was moping alongside the ocean he saw what seemed to be a living creature in the shallows off shore. It was nothing to brag about, just sort of a squishy blob, but it was the only prospect he'd seen in all his journeys, so he waded out to where it was bobbing in the waves.
He greeted the creature politely and was greeted in kind, and soon the two of them were good friends. The anthropologist explained as well as he could that he was a student of life-styles and customs, and begged his new friend for information of this sort, which was readily forthcoming. ‘And now’, he said at last, ‘I'd like to get on tape in your own words some of the stories you tell among yourselves.’
‘Stories?’ the other asked.
‘You know, like your creation myth, if you have one.’
‘What is a creation myth?’ the creature asked.
‘Oh, you know,’ the anthropologist replied, ‘the fanciful tale you tell your children about the origins of the world.’
Well, at this, the creature drew itself up indignantly- at least as well as a squishy blob can do- and replied that his people had no such fanciful tale.
‘You have no account of creation then?’
‘Certainly we have an account of creation,’ the other snapped. ‘But its definitely not a myth.’
‘Oh certainly not,’ the anthropologist said, remembering his training at last. ‘Ill be terribly grateful if you share it with me.’
‘Very well,’ the creature said. ‘But I want you to understand that, like you, we are a strictly rational people, who accept nothing that is not based on observation, logic, and scientific method.’
‘"Of course, of course,’ the anthropologist agreed.
So at last the creature began its story. ‘The universe,’ it said, ‘was born a long, long time ago, perhaps ten or fifteen billion years ago. Our own solar system-this star, this planet, and all the others- seem to have come into being some two or three billion years ago. For a long time, nothing whatever lived here. But then, after a billion years or so, life appeared.’
‘Excuse me,’ the anthropologist said. ‘You say that life appeared. Where did that happen, according to your myth- I mean, according to your scientific account.’
The creature seemed baffled by the question and turned a pale lavender. ‘Do you mean in what precise spot?’
‘No. I mean, did this happen on land or in the sea?’
‘Land?’ the other asked. ‘What is land?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he said, waving toward the shore, ‘the expanse of dirt and rocks that begins over there.’
The creature turned a deeper shade of lavender and said, ‘I cant imagine what you're gibbering about. The dirt and rocks over there are simply the lip of the vast bowl that holds the sea.’
‘Oh yes,’ the anthropologist said, ‘I see what you mean. Quite. Go on.’
‘Very well,’ the other said. ‘For many millions of centuries the life of the world was merely microorganisms floating helplessly in a chemical broth. But little by little, more complex forms appeared: single-celled creatures, slimes, algae, polyps, and so on.’
‘But finally,’ the creature said, turning quite pink with pride as he came to the climax of his story, ‘but finally jellyfish appeared!”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
“Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity,”
― H.G. Wells, quote from The War of the Worlds
The Nightingale and...
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Fragments
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