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Still, she is glad for the diversion and she doesn’t want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows.
Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?)
In Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
“I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you’ve known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you’ll forget you even knew me.”
A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It’s completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
“I thought my sister was an idiot when she married you, but now I see you’re not that bad. The way you are with Maya. The way you are now, showing up. Showing up is what counts, A.J. “I think I’d rather stay here tonight,” she says, flipping away from A.J. “There’s no one at my house, and I don’t want to be that alone. What I said before is true. Nic was the good girl. I’m bad. I married a bad man, too. And I know that bad people deserve what they get, but oh, how we hate to be alone.”
People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”
. Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.
Interesting now the names are jumbled together.
Mary → Myra
“Well, I’m warning you. I could be a bad book with a good jacket.”
Lambiase believes that cops go one of two ways as they get older. They either get more judgmental or less so. Lambiase is not so rigid as when he was a young police officer. He has found that people do all sorts of things, and they usually have their reasons.
“An e-reader! I’ve wanted one for a really long time.” She shoots a quick look over to her father. He nods, though his eyebrow is twitching slightly. “Thanks, Nana.” Maya kisses her grandmother on the cheek.
Idk why this made me snort… but it did. Watching the movie next <3
He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.
A man is not his own island. Or at least a man is not optimally his own island.
Maya, novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you’ll have mastered the world,
The words you can’t find, you borrow. We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”
It matters who placed A Wrinkle in Time in your twelve-year-old daughter’s nail-bitten fingers or who sold you that Let’s Go travel guide to Hawaii or who insisted that your aunt with the very particular tastes would surely adore Cloud Atlas.
The fact I read A Wrinkle in Time and Cloud Atlas not to long ago😀
