Anne: She is out foolin' around with that boy until two o'clock in the morning and it has got to stop! I didn't spend seventeen years of my life raising a daughter and giving her EVERYTHING, so she could throw it away on a summer romance! Young Allie...
Homer, the aged poet: Tell me, muse, of the storyteller who has been thrust to the edge of the world, both an infant and an ancient, and through him reveal everyman. With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circl...
Mayor Carmine De Pasto: If you want this year's homecoming parade in my town, you have to pay for it. Dean Vernon Wormer: Carmine, I don't think it's right that you should extort money from the college. Mayor Carmine De Pasto: Look, these parades you...
[Jake Blues is released on parole and gets back all the things he wore when he was arrested] Corrections Officer: One Timex digital watch, broken. One unused prophylactic. [looks disgusted, picks something up with his pen] Corrections Officer: One so...
Thomas Leroy: [yelling to Nina over rehearsal music] The final act. Your final dance! You've tasted your dream. Touched it! Only to have it crushed. Your heart is broken. Wounded! Your life force fading. The blood drips. The black swan stole your lov...
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like ...
Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless...
Why are you so hard on yourself? I love you just the way you are, with your withered coat and wet scarf dangling like a spotless chandelier. The snow banks in Montreal are high, but I can see your trace, and silent grace and tin cup through the paned...
I love you in my very own way. Like a stone loves the mosses around it Like a sea loves the pebbles in it Like a coincidence... Taking you as the way you are, With all the bruises, scars and broken parts all around you and your heart. I love you in m...
Seduced by the spectacular theoretical and practical successes of the objective sciences into thinking that the methods and criteria of those sciences were the only means to truth, philosophers sought to apply those same methods and criteria to quest...
THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing,...
The whole right side of his face was smashed in, concave forehead and crushed cheekbone and one eye bugging precariously from a broken socket. He was purplish-black, and dirty white: Maggots seethed from every pore and crawled across him in excited w...
She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back under her head with the wash of the water, like a pulsati...
MYSTERIES, YES Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch ...
A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heart-broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' and I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news ...
One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonme...
But that's the thing about all of this," he says gently but urgently, "we survive. After each known down, each earth shattering blow, we get up again. Even though we walk through hell, and it feels like all we do is walk through hell, we do eventuall...
There was a moment of hesitation in which Joe looked into her eyes, and she looked back without flinching. Many a time, he had been at the same game with her, and she had always crumbled, bowing to his will. Now, he must have realized he was looking ...
Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She’s suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale is empty. Invisible ...
He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapid...
I think can sit here for hours, Arguing with the world as to why I can't give up, Tell everyone around me what a blessing you are, Laugh at all the times that you've brought sun into my life, I can tell everyone how passionate you are and how much yo...