Whitney’s Comments (group member since Dec 10, 2015)

Whitney’s comments from the Snippets That Inspire group.

An Excerpt from "When the Heart Waits" by Sue Monk Kidd: The Story of Stripe and Yellow

Sue Monk Kidd tells the story of Stripe and Yellow, two caterpillars who, before spinning their cocoons, had they spent all their time (as did very other caterpillar they knew) climbing up a great column of squirming, pushing caterpillars – a caterpillar pillar.

The point of life seemed to be to reach the top, though no one knew what was up there. They just hoped that the summit would offer them what they were looking for in life. In the meantime, their existence was pretty frantic, with lots of rushing and straining. It boiled down to this: climb or be climbed.

Finally, disenchanted with crawling up, Stripe and Yellow became still. Soon they were at the bottom of the pillar, free to spin the cocoons. They did not know it at the time, but that cocoon would result in a while new thing -- with wings Once their cocoon opened to the light, they found thy could fly. They had wings! And they flew past all the struggling caterpillars -- right to the top. Flying, to their delight, turned out to be The Best Way to get to the top. Thus, Stripe and Yellow had made their deepest progress standing still.

A quote from Leonard Bernstein:

"Any great work of art revives and re-adapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world -- the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."

From "The Glass Castle" by Jeanette Walls:

Mom didn’t like cooking much -- “Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same week or so, I can do a painting that will last forever?” -- so once a week or so, she’d fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans. We’d all sort through the beans together, picking out the rocks, then Mom would soak them overnight, boil them the next day with an old ham bone to give them flavor, and for that entire week, we’d have beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If the beans started going bad, we just put extra spice in them, like the Mexicans at the LBJ apartments always did.

From “Stoner” by John Williams:

There are wars and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.

From "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood: "Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?"

In his book entitled "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek includes many notable quote, one of which is from Johann C.F. Holderin, who said:

"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."

From "Midnight’s Children" by Salmon Rushdie:

“What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.”

The poet Yeats said, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Then along came Chinua Achebe and a book he entitled "Things Fall Apart" in which he wrote, “When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

From Lord Byron:

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink falling like dew upon a thought produces that which makes millions think."

Oscar Wilde said, I am not a thing -- an actor, a writer -- I am a person who does things -- I write, I act -- and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle

The Astronaut Story from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller


One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story, the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. The astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says his story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God.

After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination, I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years, my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet, I would not be able to touch my face to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.

I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy’s story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years, I beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.

After I thought about Stacy’s story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched… I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts, moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

… Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven, then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live.

Lemony Snicket in The Wide Window says:

Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.

From Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

There are index cards on my desk that record things I thought of or saw or remembered or overheard … there is even one from years ago when I was walking along the salt marsh between Sausalito and Mill Valley. Bicyclists were passing me on both sides, and I wasn’t paying much attention until suddenly a woman rode past wearing some sort of lemon perfume. And in a split second I was in one of those Proustian olfactory flashbacks, twenty-five or so years before, in the kitchen of one of my aunts, with her many children, my cousins, on a hot summer day. I was the eldest, at eight or so, and my aunt and uncle had just gotten divorced. She was sad and worried, and I think to soothe herself and help her wounded ego, she had done a little retail therapy: she’d gone to the store and spend several dollars on a lemonade-making contraption.

Of course, it goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, and sugar. That’s all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my aunt was a little depressed, and this lemonade-making thing must have seemed like something that would be fun and maybe hydrate her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool, sweet lemonade. The contraption consisted of a glass pitcher, with a lemon squeezer that fit on top and that had a holding tank for the lemon juice. What you did was to fill the pitcher with water and ice cubes and sugar, then put the squeezer -- with is holding tank -- on top, squeeze a bunch of lemons, then put the lemon juice from the holding tank into the pitcher. Finally, you got your long spoon and stirred. The lemon googe and seeds stayed on top in the juice squeezer. The whole thing was very efficient, but if you thought about it too long, totally stupid, too.

So there we were in the kitchen, the five cousins and me, crowded around her as she proudly made us lemonade. She put the cold water in the pitcher, added ice cubes, lots of sugar, put the juicer lid on top, squeezed a dozen lemons, and then began to take glasses down from the cupboard. Wait! we older ones wanted to cry out, you haven’t poured in the lemon juice. Stop! Mistakes are being made! But she got out jelly glasses, plastic glasses, a couple of brilliant aluminum glasses, and poured even servings. There we were, six anxious black-belt codependents, unable to breathe, with a longing for everything to be Okay and for her not to be sad anymore. She raised her glass to us as a toast, and we took sips of our sugary ice water, and my aunt’s hands were so lemony from cutting and squeezing all those lemons that she must have tasted lemon. We all stared at her helplessly as we drank our sugar water, then smiled and raised our glasses like we were doing a soft-drink commercial, and held them out for more.

I perfectly remembered, there on the salt marsh, the crummy linoleum on my aunt’s kitchen floor, graying beige speckled with black, and how it wore away to all back near the sink, and how at it’s most worn place, rotten wood showed through. And how all those cousins, some so young they must have thought ice-cold sugar water was about as good as the getting got, stood at the sink with us older kids, in a ring around my aunt. And how close I felt to them all, how much a part of the wheel.

It touches me deeply, the poignancy of the crummy linoleum, of my aunt’s pain and her pride in her lemonade-making machine, of all the ways in which we try to comfort ourselves, of her wanting to make us better lemonade, of us wanting to make her better, the enthusiasm with which we drank and held out our glasses, as if we were hoisting steins at Oktoberfest. And I hadn’t remembered any of this in twenty-five years.

Now maybe I’m not going to use it anywhere. All the index card says is “The lemonade-making thing.” But it’s like a snippet from a movie, a vignette of a family in pain, managing to survive, one of those rare moments when people’s hearts are opened by disappointment and love, and for just a few minutes, against all odds, everything is more or less Okay.

From Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie

No colors except green and black the walls are green the sky is black (there is no roof) the stars are green the Widow is green but her hair is black as black. The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s hair has a center-parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow’s arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow’s hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow’s hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. And little balls fly into night between the walls the children shriek as one by one the Widow’s hand. And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow’s hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow’s hand comes hunting hunting the skin is green the nails are black towards the corner hunting hunting while we shrink closer into the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the Hand comes reaching reaching and she my sister pushes me out out of the corner while she stays cowering staring the hand the nails are curling scream and mmff and splash of black and up into the high as sky and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black …

The fever broke today.

From "Bondage Breaker" by Neil Anderson:

I don’t labor in the vineyard with the hope that God may one day accept me; God has already accepted me – that’s why I labor in the vineyard (Page 51).

From the Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson:

One color of wildflower was no better than another to her, so she made no distinctions whatsoever… She had a way of looking past the outer layer of people and seemed to regard everyone she met with a kind of searching intensity, as if this were the first person she had ever seen.

Thanks, Tim -- I love Goodreads so far. I wrote an article on it last November for Tom Blubaugh on LinkedIn -- you might like it. If you want to read it, let me know, and I will send you a copy. Either here or email at wmckmoore@gmail.com -- it seems I am terrible at interacting on Google+ it seems...

Tim wrote: ""In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to..."

Tim, thankyouthankyouthankyou for this DELICIOUS morsel. You are the first person ever to share something here at Snippets That Inspire. I am new to Goodreads, and it is encouraging to hear from you! Have a great weekend...

Some consider the best first paragraph to be from "The Haunting Of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were securely shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked in walked alone.

Do you a favorite first paragraph? If so, please consider sharing it here at Snippets That Inspire.