Quotes from Unwritten Rules

M.A. Stacie ·  256 pages

Rating: (2.9K votes)


“I don't deserve you. I'm not made for relationships. I know I'm going to fuck this up. I'm going to drive you away or do something to hurt you, and you'll be added to my list of people I screwed over. You should walk away now.”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules


“I always watch you. You consume my every thought.”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules


“My life was dark, torture and empty before you found me. You brought the light, Red. I love you.”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules


“Each day we stood almost shoulder to shoulder, occupying the same space, breathing the same air, but we remained strangers.”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules


“Oh, you want me to lie still while you check me out? Damn, Red, if I'd have known that earlier I would've been horizontal already.”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules



“Do you have my pussy? Oh God, cat!
Do you have my cat?”
― M.A. Stacie, quote from Unwritten Rules


About the author

M.A. Stacie
Born place: in Manchester, The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“If the Holy Ghost judged the state of the Jewish Church to be weak and imperfect - because it rested on high priests that died one after another, although their succession was expressly ordained of God himself - shall we suppose that the Lord Christ, who came to consummate the church, and to bring it unto the most perfect estate whereof in this world it is capable, should build it on a succession of dying men, concerning which succession there is not the least intimation that it is appointed of God? And as unto the matter of fact, we know both what interruptions it hath received, and what monsters it hath produced - both sufficiently manifesting that it is not of God.”
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― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey


Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning


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