“Because it wasn’t just my private Idaho anymore. It was our private Idaho.”
“I straightened my tie. Looked in the mirror. For the first time in a long time, I liked what I saw. It was time to stop playing devil’s advocate. Time to grow up. Time to work at being a real devil’s advocate.”
“‘I didn’t come here to make friends,’ I shouted. Suddenly, her hand was on my shoulder. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. But you made them anyway.’ The rest of them stepped out from the shadows, forming a circle around me. They were all my friends now.”
“‘If you can’t handle me at my best,’ she said, placing a hand under her chin and peeling away the skin, ‘YOU DESERVE ME AT MY WORST.’”
“Helplessly I realized that although I had shot for the moon base, I had missed. We had landed among the stars, and would die soon.”
“We screamed, then. For ice cream, certainly. But mostly for ourselves.”
“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I can’t even.” Her eyes were soft, and gentle. I believe in you,” she said. “I believe that you can even.”
“Ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred years of solitude. Time to go home and see all of my friends, who were still alive after one hundred years, I sure hoped.”
“It hadn’t killed me. As I lifted myself free of my bonds, tossing screaming villagers left and right like droplets from a spring shower, I realized it had, in fact, only made me stronger. Terribly, horribly stronger.”
“‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ It was. It really was. I curled up next to her and we fell asleep smiling, thinking of how pretty it was.”
“But the lambs weren’t silent anymore. They were singing.”
Tags: books, epiphanies, last lines
“Our swords clashed, and as we parried, I saw her eyes, so very very blue, through the slit in her visor. As our gazes locked, I could see those blue eyes soften, and I remembered what my mother told me: ‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.’ She was righter than she knew.”
I squinted hard, facing into the wind, watching the sheep further down the hill. They were my family now – no one could truly love someone who looked like me. If only I’d believed my mother, I thought sadly. If only I’d truly understood that my face would stay like that.
In the end, weren’t we all Ishmael, really?
Bahaahahhahahahaha this is the best.
It’s so great that I can’t even.
YES YOU CAN EVEN
THANK YOU FOR BELIEVING IN ME
With brilliance such as “We screamed, then. For ice cream, certainly. But mostly for ourselves,” how can we not?
oh dear I loved that line from A Sun Also Rises SO MUCH when I was fifteen.
Did the singing lambs sound like this?
This is killing me. LOVE!
And that’s when I learned that children really are cheaper by the dozen.
You HAVE to add that to your list.
ON IT
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
And then Cthulhu stirred from the depths. I heard Heathcliff’s ghastly indescribable screech, and from that graveyard that had been the happy host of so many secret and forbidden meetings came a shambling form, more secret and forbidden than any tryst.”
I would like to read this book. Please tell me it has already been written.
As the other ponies made their swim to Chincoteague, the morning sun sparkling on the channel waters and the herder’s head still below her hoof, Jingles knew she would never be treated like cattle again, her young calf auctioned off. They would be free.
Colt not calf, but this is still awesome.
“And you say, ‘Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.’ And then you put a fingertip into the book to mark your place, arranging your face in a moue of attention as your companion speaks, and gradually, as he rambles, you gently withdraw that fingertip bookmark because, c’mon, really?”
“I swallowed, gulping down the last mouthful of flesh and blood. Within moments a pain started on the side of my hips. His terrifed face formed there in scar tissure. I patted him. “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” I said.
I smiled as the man broke down, dribbling onto his front and screaming. He wasn’t making sense anymore, not after he realized what I was going to do to him. He had seen the headlines, he knew how this story would end. There would be no mercy here. It gave me a certain frisson of delight, and I knew his death would be far more satisfactory than the others who had gone quietly, whimpering, to their fate. He would not be going without a fight. Yes, I thought, as I struck the match. The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live. As the flames crept up his shirtsleeves and caught the bottle of hand sanitizer in his shirt pocket, there was a small but glorious explosion of color. I laughed to watch him burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
OMG LURVE!
With brilliance such as “We screamed, then. For ice cream, certainly. But mostly for ourselves,” how can we not?
‘You know,” she said. “I always thought it was true about the saddest words, you know, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But now I know better. The saddest words are ‘We just ran out of bourbon and the packy store’s closed.'”
'You know," she said. "I always thought it was true about the saddest words, you know, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
"Yeah?" I said.
"Yeah," she said. "But now I know better. The saddest words are 'We just ran out of bourbon and the packy store's closed.'"
I stood in the empty stadium and realized that the old man was right – I may be a dog, but now I am also the man.
FAVORITE.
I stood in the empty stadium and realized that the old man was right – I may be a dog, but now I am also the man.
“Helplessly I realized that although I had shot for the moon base, I had missed. We had landed among the stars, and would die soon.”
“We screamed, then. For ice cream, certainly. But mostly for ourselves.”
omg dying
dead
This is hilarious. You forgot a quotation mark, though: Her eyes were soft, and gentle. I believe in you,” she said. “I believe that you can even.”
Right before the I in “I believe in you.”
Slowly it dawned on me: God was not there. Not for me, Margaret, or anyone else.
“Tears streamed down my face as I clicked up the stairs to my apartment, heels bleeding in my too-tight stilettos. He didn’t love me and he never would. But maybe, I mused, love didn’t belong to me, not to him, not to anybody”
“After three years, I had finally finished it: my greatest joy, the bane of my existence, my “capolavoro” as Professor Bruni would say. But it didn’t mean anything without her, and it was too late now.”
“I put my broken retainer back in its case. I’ll show Sherri, I’ll show all of them. I knew exactly how I was going to use that Bat Mitzvah money. If things went according to plan, nobody at Beth Israel High would ever forget the name Rivka Rosenblatt.”
PRINCE
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and of her Romeo.
FRIAR JOHN
In point of fact, Antigone’s quite sad
She tries to bury bro, gets killed by dad.
BALTHASAR
The Iliad’s quite somber, read in haste.
Thousands of soldiers die for lust. A waste.
THIRD WATCHMAN
A man named Martin wrote of weddings, red
I could not finish; I hid under bed.
CAPULET
Good gentlemen. Our daughter now has died.
This story’s tragic. Can that be denied?
FRIAR JOHN
But is it, though? Verona now has peace.
Its citizens can walk the streets with calm;
And no more bloodshed will occur. It must be said:
Their deaths, while tragic, bring a healing balm.
(everyone slowly turns to look at Friar John)
PRINCE
Good Friar. You’ve done noble deeds galore.
Confirm, sir, you did not seek out this gore.
FRIAR JOHN
Oh, how weary, stale, unprofitable their romance–
LADY CAPULET
Hang him, Prince! And make the scoundrel dance!
(All gathered at the graveyard rush Friar John and carry him off.
Prince looks out to the audience.)
PRINCE
… I got nothin’.