“Like they said, when you have a boy you worry about one boy, when you have a girl…you worry about all the boys.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“The rest of them would just dry off as much as possible then throw shorts and tees on over their suits. They were from the Copper Country—with water everywhere you turned—so they were used to sitting on towels in their car seats in the summer.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“It wasn’t hard to track Stevie down in the crowd. Lizzie found the girl in the purple tank fairly easily then scanned a twenty-yard radius looking for the boy. Sure enough, there he was, skulking behind a shortcake booth, eyes huge as he watched the purple tank girl enjoying a strawberry ice cream cone. Not wanting to embarrass the kid, she told Finn she’d round Stevie up then meet him and Annie back at the minivan. She surreptitiously circled the booth until she came up behind Stevie. In her best secret-agent voice, while pretending she didn’t see him, she whispered, “Psst, the eagle takes flight in five minutes. I repeat, the eagle takes flight in five minutes.” She saw Stevie’s body grow rigid, then relax. “Roger that,” he said under his breath.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“Think of it as a journey that you are driving. Suddenly you realize you are going in the wrong direction, have been for some time. Do you pull over and spend hours trying to figure out why you went the wrong way? No, you turn the car around and start to drive in the right direction. Along the way, you start to think about the reason you got off course, but you do that as you’re headed toward your destination.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“grandmother was in her kitchen, fixing”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“come back since even though Eino, understanding his loss, told”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“God, Liz. I…I can’t believe it’s you,” the shock was evident in his voice. “You’re so…so…old.” His hand left hers as he covered his eyes, shaking his head. “I mean. I didn’t mean.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“Too much to hope for that you guys didn’t hear that, eh?”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“Oooh yah, it’s good to be back in da Yoop, eh?” Katie crowed out in an exaggerated Yooper accent as they crossed the bridge to Hancock.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“What daddies did for their little girls, never mind if their babies were ten or thirty-five.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“They honestly wouldn’t do the operation if you couldn’t find a way to pay for it?” “That’s right. They run a business, Liz, they can’t just be giving it away.” “That’s what you get for going to the University of Michigan Hospital.” “I know the Spartan in you can’t stand it, but you have to admit U of M has one of the best hospitals around.” “Okay, I admit it, grudgingly, but only because State doesn’t have a hospital of their own. If they did, I’m sure it’d be better.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“collected the runners up from the bed.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“You can take the girl out of da Yoop, but you can’t take da Yoop out of the girl.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work. ~ Daniel H. Burnham”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“The women were on the lawn at Alison’s camp. In the U.P., all cottages, cabins, summer homes of any kind were called camps.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“What? What’s the third date?” Katie asked, not having been on a third date in seventeen years. “That’s usually the date that ‘it’ happens,” Lizzie explained. “That’s when you fuck,” Alison said at the same time. Katie frowned at Alison and motioned for Lizzie to continue.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“The route home they’d chosen was her idea. She said she, Alison, and Katie had done it years ago when they’d spent a weekend at Mackinac Island. Within the course of one afternoon, they’d swum in Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior, hitting three of the five Great Lakes.”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Weight
“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from The Sorrows of Young Werther
“I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety. Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from A Walk in the Woods
“Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze -
On me alone it blew.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Bonfire of the Vanities
“But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Still Life with Woodpecker
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