Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;.
Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign – wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.
It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema-bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man’s face.
You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.
Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood – for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?” “Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?
Lupe’s language is just a little different,” Juan Diego was saying. “I can understand it.
But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not.
I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald’s sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her – as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.
Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
Old Lowji’s nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!” Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.
In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without – we just do without.
We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
It was a deus-ex-machina world!
But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it.
It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.
There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they’re supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn’t have gone on holding each other on the stairs: it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.
Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.
Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.
Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.
God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us – at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.