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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands.”

“The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).”

“The girls seemed unconcerned and went about their days, each as lovely in their own way as the flowers they tended. Sorrel's black hair became streaked with premature white, which gave her an exotic air, although the elegance was somewhat ruined by the muddy jeans and shorts she practically lived in. Nettie, on the other hand, had a head of baby-fine blonde hair that she wore short, thinking, wrongly, that it would look less childlike. Nettie wouldn't dream of being caught in dirty jeans and was always crisply turned out in khaki capris or a skirt and a white shirt. She considered her legs to be her finest feature. She was not wrong. Patience was the sole Sparrow redhead, although her hair had deepened from its childhood ginger and was now closer to the color of a chestnut. It was heavy and glossy as a horse's mane, and she paid absolutely no attention to it or to much else about her appearance, nor did she have to. In the summer her wide-legged linen trousers and cut-off shorts were speckled with dirt and greenery, her camisoles tatty and damp. The broad-brimmed hat she wore to pick was most often dangling from a cord down her back. As a result, the freckles that feathered across her shoulders and chest were the color of caramel and resistant to her own buttermilk lotion (Nettie smoothed it on Patience whenever she could make her stand still). When it was terribly hot, Patience wore the sundresses she'd found packed away in the attic. She knew they were her mother's, and she liked to imagine how happy Honor had been in them.”

“The girls that I grew up with, and my friends and I, we just never had interests in common. I loved comedy. I loved Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner, Lucille Ball, and Goldie Hawn movies. I just wanted to laugh. I liked women in comedy, and I liked male comics as I got a little older. My interests just never matched up with other girls'.”

“The girls, their feet in the cold water, utter cries like a seagull's. Moreover, they are immediately transformed into seagulls, and these in turn into the obscure object of desire, swaying and waddling like the ostrich at the end of Buñuel's film. The summer has arrived. I was very anxious she might be disappointed and I could never have forgiven her for that. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America. They are at the centre of the world and they don't know it. What they prefer is to be at the centre of books and the earth. Only sequoias have the heroic, fabulous, antediluvian stature of the first days of the world, being contemporary with the great prehistoric animals. And indeed their scaley bark resembles a carapace. They are the only trees on a par with the geological and mineral scenario of the deserts. After them it is the little species that have triumphed.”

“The girls who were unanimously considered beautiful often rested on their beauty alone. I felt I had to do things, to be intelligent and develop a personality in order to be seen as attractive. By the time I realized maybe I wasn't plain and might even possibly be pretty, I had already trained myself to be a little more interesting and informed.”

“The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.”

“The giuggiole, or jujube fruit, resembles an olive and tastes, at first, like a woody apple. After withering off the vine, it takes on a sweeter flavor, closer to a honeyed fig. Among the medieval elite, the fruit was so popular that it gave birth to an idiom: "andare in brodo di giuggiole"--- "To go in jujube broth"--- defined in one of the earliest Italian phrase books as living in a state of bliss. Every fall, the handful of families that still cultivate the fruit in the village gather in medieval garb to celebrate the jujube and feast on the fine liquors, jams, and blissful sweet broth they create from it. Italy is full of places like Arquà Petrarca. Microclimates and artisanal techniques become the basis for obscure local specialties celebrated in elaborate festivals from Trapani to Trieste. In Mezzago, outside Milan, its rare pink asparagus, turned red by soil rich in iron and limited sunlight. Sicily has its Avola almonds and peculiar blood-red oranges, which gain their deep color on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna. Calabria has 'nduja sausage and the Diamante citron, central to the Jewish feast of Sukkot.”

“The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen.”

“The Giver hugged him. "I love you, Jonas," he said. "But I have another place to go. When my work here is finished, I want to be with my daughter." Jonas had been staring glumly at the floor. Now he looked up, startled. "I didn't know you had a daughter, Giver! You told me that you'd had a spouse. But I never knew about your daughter." The Giver smiled, and nodded. For the first time in their long months together, Jonas saw him look truly happy. "Her name was Rosemary," The Giver said.”

“The giver is the blessed! The receiver stands still.”