The power of a smile is such that even drawing a happy face on a piece of paper makes your lips turn up.
It went on and on; intentionally, unintentionally, it didn't matter. The end was the same: broken people left in pieces, lives fractured, love bludgeoned.
You could be the ugliest, nastiest most miserable piece of shit known to man, but if you had a beating heart there was always a chance you'd turn into a diamond after a million years.
They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
The college diploma has no more power to hold the knowledge you have gained in college than a piece of tissue paper over a gas jet can hold the gas in the pipe.
What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.
This was no peck on the lips. This was a real first kiss, a movie-star-knock-her-socks-off-fireworks-light-up-the-sky kind of kiss. A girl could live to be a hundred and never forget that kiss.
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.
Did you pick that out?" I asked Dimitri. Honestly, I would have expected him to bend a piece of steel with his bare hands and present her with that.
I’m stoic like a statue of Stonewall Jackson. I’d make a great U.S. President, but I’d make an even better chiseled piece of marble—and that’s what makes me such an amazing lover.
Why spend ten dollars to buy one item that does two things, when for five dollars a piece I can sell you two items that each does one thing?
I was nothing but a failure. A fucked-up, broken shame. I was nothing but this emptiness. A shell ruined by fame. Don’t be afraid to shatter, baby, if that will set you free. I’ll find you in the pieces and that will unbreak me.
When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.
It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.
Guilt ripped into her like a rusty, serrated knife. It took up residence in her soul, settling in and getting comfortable so it could saw away ragged pieces of flesh and leave her to bleed.
What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.
It doesn't seem to make any sense, but then it never does! It's usually only afterwards when the pieces finally fit together, that you're left standing there thinking how obvious it always was.
Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.
