Steve > Steve's Quotes

“One look at Madame Barton, and any woman would think twice, then a third time, before committing to plastic surgery. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and round; too much skin had been removed for them to close properly;”
― Suzanne Munshower, Younger

“she must, Anna thought, need to sleep with some kind of pads over them to keep her eyeballs moist. Whatever nose had once sat in the middle of her face had melted into a small, pug-like muzzle, while oversized cheek implants added an almost whimsical touch of chipmunk. Lips too lush for even a twenty-year-old were the finishing touch, ballooning out from her face, turning up at the ends, and making a normal chin look weak and recessive atop a tight, corded neck. The Joker, Anna thought. The thick curls of a platinum wig tumbled about this hodgepodge of readjusted features, undoubtedly hiding a hairline a good five”
― Suzanne Munshower, Younger

“We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“She kept repeating that if she had dedicated herself assiduously to every child in the neighborhood, in a generation everything would change, there would no longer be the smart and the incompetent, the good and the bad. Then she looked at her son and again burst out crying.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“For example, I came to my exams very well prepared, but if the professor were suddenly to ask me, “Do you know from what works I derive the authority on the basis of which I teach this subject in this university?” I wouldn’t know what to answer. But the others knew. So I moved among them fearful of saying and doing the wrong things.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“His wealth, his upbringing, his reputation, well known among the students, as a young militant on the left, his sociability, even his courage when he delivered carefully measured speeches against powerful people within and outside the university—all this had given him an aura that automatically extended to me, as his fiancée or girlfriend or companion, as if the pure and simple fact that he loved me were the public sanctioning of my talents.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“adore having you. It’s only Ian; he was saying tonight he wondered if you wouldn’t feel more comfortable if you paid something…”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a “view-point,” the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“prescribed exercise, still ran through boskage between the partisan bivouacs. The circle of villas in the outskirts of the town abandoned precipitately by their owners had been allotted by the partisans to various official purposes. In the largest of these the Russian mission lurked invisibly.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“Virginia’s son was born on June 4th, the day on which all allied armies entered Rome.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender

“Next morning at first light to Guy’s surprise the troopship at last emerged from the haze of myth and was seen to be solidly at anchor beyond the mouth of the harbor.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy

“answered slowly: I don’t know, I don’t want to know. And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us. Too much fear, if we had been seen we would have been beaten to death.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“The two drinks were brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like ‘doubles’ at a bar, and all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room smelling game.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited