“It's hard to keep a secret when it's written all over your body... ”
― quote from Willow
“...if this is not a happy ending, it is perhaps a happy beginning.”
― quote from Willow
“Well, sometimes I worry that my whole life will be based about what's comfortable and easy. I'll care too much about what makes me feel good to ever really reach for anything. And then I worry that even if I do, I won't succeed.”
― quote from Willow
“If you go, then I'll miss you.. terribly”
― quote from Willow
“If she let herself, she’d drown in a world of pain”
― quote from Willow
“I just figured out why someone would want to make the first mirror... I think some lover wanted his beloved to see how she appeared to him. He wanted her to be able to see herself the way that he did.”
― quote from Willow
“I guess what scares me the most now is the thought that I won't be able to protect you”
― quote from Willow
“...her hand closes on smooth metal. Her fingers test the sharpness of the edge. Perfect. It's a fresh blade.
The girls' voices rustle in her head. Their clamoring pushes out all rational thought. She rolls up her sleeve.
The bite of the blade kills the noise. It wipes out the memory of those staring faces. Willow looks at her arm, at the life springing from her. Tiny pinpricks of red that blossom into giant peonies.”
― quote from Willow
“I need a Kleenex.” She sniffs.
Guy disengages his hands from hers, takes the hem of his
sweatshirt, and wipes her nose with it.
“That’s romantic,” she says, embarrassed.
“Well, it is sort of, because I wouldn’t do it for anybody else
in the world.”
― quote from Willow
“Willow sees her before any of the others. A walking skeleton, the victim of some terrible wasting disease, like something out of the history books, a death camp survivor. It takes Willow a moment to realize that the girl is none of those things. She's just a girl, a girl like Willow, who's chosen to inflict terrible pain on herself. Only this girl's weapon isn't a razor, it's starvation.”
― quote from Willow
“Every lineament of the girl's wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there's something ironic in her compassion for the other girl, but she can't help feeling that this utter mortification of the flesh is far worse than anything that she herself has done.”
― quote from Willow
“If it all looks good on the surface, I'll know I've failed at life”
― quote from Willow
“You couldn't really say that something that hurts so badly feels good exactly. It's more that it just feels right. And something that feels so right just couldn't be bad. It has to be good.”
― quote from Willow
“oh brave new world that has such a person in it.”
― quote from Willow
“We'd already talked in the stacks, and I knew you were different from any other girl I'd met. And you told me that your parents were dead, and I thought that you were so . . . lost and vulnerable. So when I saw you in the physics lab . . . and I saw you try and take care of someone that you thought who had been through what you'd been through; could be that . . . well, generous, and thoughtfull . . ." Guy said.
"But you hardly knew me." said Willow
"I know . . . I didn't know that we'd even talk again, or that if we did, if we'd get along, or maybe you were seeing someone else . . . I just knew that the way you tried to protect someone's life that, especially given your situation . . . I just . . . I though that you had to be the most special girl I would ever meet . . .”
― quote from Willow
“I bought you something" Willows blurts out.
"You bought...What?"
Willow closes her eyes for a second. She's a little surprised she's going to give it to him after all, but there's no going back now. She has to.
"At the bookstore." She reaches into her bag again, and pushes the package across the table towards him.
Guy takes the book out of the bag slowly, Willow waits for him to look disappointed, to look confused that she would buy him such a battered, old-
"I love it when used books have notes in the margins, it's the best," Guy says as he flips through the pages. "I always imagine who read it before me." He pauses and looks at one of Prospero's speeches. "I have way too much homework to read this now, but you know what? Screw it. I want to know why it's your favorite Shakespeare. Thank you, that was really nice of you. I mean, you really didn't have to."
"But I did anyway," Willow says so quietly she's not even sure hears her.
Hey," Guy frowns for a second. "You didn't write anything in here."
"Oh, I didn't even think...I, well, I wouldn't even know what to write," Willow says shyly.
"Well, maybe you'll think of something later," he says.
Willow watches Guy read the opening. There's no mistaking it. His smile is genuine, and she can't help thinking that if she can't make David look like this, at least she can do it for someone.”
― quote from Willow
“It's hard to keep something a secret when it's written all over you body.”
― quote from Willow
“And she realized that this is true. Pain has somehow transformed into pleasure, and that pleasure is better than any pain could ever be.”
― quote from Willow
“How can she explain to him that every tear takes her further and further away from the box of razors that lies between them. How can she explain that she is terrified of such a thing happening. That although she thought she wanted freedom from her implements, she doesn't know if she can handle what she's experiencing now. That she wants to know that she is still in charge of her grief. That her blades have always done her bidding.”
― quote from Willow
“And she knows then that she was right about her brother, that it takes an unbelievable strength to feel this kind of grief, and she doesn't know if she can handle it, because it really hurts, hurts her more than the razor ever could.”
― quote from Willow
“She watches as the blood springs from the cut she's making, but it doesn't change anything. Not this time. She swipes again, deeper. Now she feels pain, but will it be enough?”
― quote from Willow
“If someone were to look carefully, the angry red marks underneath the fine cotton of her blouse would be clearly visible. But nobody ever does look carefully.”
― quote from Willow
“Es difícil guardar un secreto cuando lo llevas escrito por todo el cuerpo”
― quote from Willow
“—Acabo de comprender por qué alguien quiso hacer el primer espejo.
Willow parpadea sorprendida. Eso no era en absoluto lo que estaba esperando.
—¿Por qué?
—Imagino que un hombre enamorado deseaba que su amante supiera como era ella para él. Quería que ella fuera capaz de verse tal y como él la veía.”
― quote from Willow
“But with you, well, the things you say ... You do get it, and that does make me feel ... better." Willow can feel herself starting to blush.
"You blush a lot," Guy says after a moment.
"I can't help it."
"Well, don't help it. I mean, blushing. I think that's sweet."
"Oh."
"And I'm really happy if anything I do makes you feel any better.”
― quote from Willow
“And yet, as she sits there with him on the window seat, with his strong arms around her, she knows that if she can survive crying, then there are other things she can survive too. And that if some things are lost to her forever, there are others that she has not yet begun to experience. She knows too that what she wants is not because passion is the natural antidote to grief, but because it is the most natural, most perfect, most complete expression of what she feels for him.”
― quote from Willow
“-Acabo de comprender por qué alguien quiso hacer el primer espejo,
- Porque?
- Imagino que un hombre enamorado deseaba que su amada supiera cómo era ella para él. Quería que ella fuera capaz de verse tal y como él la veía.”
― quote from Willow
“But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from El segundo sexo
“It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“But even if we practice diligently, we will still endure real-world failure from time to time. And it is often in these circumstances, when failure is most threatening to our ego, that we need to learn most of all. Practice is not a substitute for learning from real-world failure; it is complementary to it. They are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“If we're afraid, sometimes there are things that can feed on that fear. Fear makes it worse for us. The trick is to concentrate on what you can see and stop thinking about yourself. It works every time...”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice
Winter's Passage
The Last of the Wine
A Handful of Dust
The Magic
This is All: The Pil...
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