“He held her face in his hands and his gaze warmed her sadness. “I don’t care how you got here. I’m just happy you were born.” He rubbed noses with hers. “Real happy.”
― Selena Robins, quote from What a Girl Wants
“There was no way to lead up to this gently. With a surge of assertiveness driven by desire as well as a couple of cosmopolitans, she took both his hands in hers and mustered up her confidence. “I want you to lick me cross-eyed.”
“You want me to what?”
“Okay, that sounded better inside my head.” She squeezed his hands. “I want sex. Great sex. Alex, let’s do it.”
― Selena Robins, quote from What a Girl Wants
“Embracing and being thankful for the family and friends I do have instead of yearning for the family I cannot know or have has helped erase the hollowness I felt when I first found out. When I consider my good health, sense of humor, adventurous side, creative gifts and even my quirky phobias, I am grateful that the two people responsible for creating me existed.” (Maddie Saunders, the heroine)”
― Selena Robins, quote from What a Girl Wants
“I’m sorry. I forgot this is Maddie’s world of sex and the rest of us star in it.”
She punctuated each word, poking her finger in his chest. “And you should be grateful.”
― Selena Robins, quote from What a Girl Wants
“Life’s a beach and then you have sex on it.” Maddie Saunders' philosophy”
― Selena Robins, quote from What a Girl Wants
“In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, quote from Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
“Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at the bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That's not courage.”
― Russell Banks, quote from The Sweet Hereafter
“he was as if a “reborn” human being, a “fundamentalist” as a human being.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“Anything you can imagine is probably true. And the worst you can imagine is probably worth money.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“By relying primarily on voluntary co-operation and private enterprise, in both economic and other activities, we can insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector and an effective protection of freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought.”
― Milton Friedman, quote from Capitalism and Freedom
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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