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Quote by Ellen Read

“The spicy sweet fragrance of the large full blooms, which rambled over the side and top of an arched metal framework, welcomed them as they walked beneath them. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy, dust motes floating languorously in the golden beams that spotlighted clumps of wayward snowdrops growing in the lawn.”

Quote by Ellen Read

Work

The Dragon Sleeps

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Author

Ellen Read

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“She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious. The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community. Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.”

“All useless, according to the common sense of utility, yet all of them inspiring in me curiosity and the simplest delight. Delight in the fact that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It reminds me of my duty, everyone's duty, to the future. My friends kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people's future dreams and not feel totally alone.”

“...until I had been forced to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really thought: that despite the craftsmanship it made absolutely zero difference whether Kitsey chose the x pattern or the y pattern since as far as I was concerned it was basically all the same; new, charmless, dead-in-hand, not to mention the expense: eight hundred dollars for a made-yesterday plate? One plate? There were beautiful eighteenth-century sets to be had for a fraction of the price of this cold, bright, newly-minted stuff.”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art claims to be the largest in the western hemisphere. It's right, but I'm not too sure about the arts bit. Don't misunderstand me. It's got tons of genuine art. It's also got tons of stuff that is hard to classify. I can't come to grips with a massive cube with a grandiose title. I allow that it's art, but not my sort. I need the big stone block to tell me something about the bloke whose name's on the caption, and it doesn't. That off my chest, I admit that any place with 3.3 million works of art truly is a wonder.”

“The Nazi salute was performed by public officials in the USA from 1892 through 1942. The researcher Dr. Rex Curry asks 'What happened to the photographs and films of the American Nazi salute performed by federal, state, county, and local officials?' Those photos and films are rare because people don't want to know the truth. Public officials in the USA who preceded the German socialist (Hitler) and the Italian socialist (Mussolini) were sources for the stiff-armed salute (and robotic chanting) in those countries and other foreign countries.”