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She had the advantage of him, in the preparation of the last few moments. All the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise were over with her. Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery.

Persuasion (Jane Austen) P. 169

Half Broke Horses (Jeannette Walls)

"Most important thing in life," he would say, "is learning how to fall." (p. 21)

"I decided this was not the moment to push the point. When someone’s wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal." (p. 103)

"I realized … I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me." (p. 113)

When Jim came home that night, I told him what had happened. “This is getting predictable,” he said. “What are you talking about?” I said. “These showdowns. It’s becoming a pattern.” “It would either be a pattern of me standing up for myself or a pattern of me getting pushed around.” (p. 180)

Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen)

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to force my mind to go blank, but it won’t. The more distressing the memory, the more persistent its presence. (p. 143) * Afterward, she lies nestled against me, her hair tickling my face. I stroke her lightly, memorizing her body. I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my life days with her encased in my skin. (p. 273) * In the entire history of our marriage, it was the only secret I kept from her, and eventually it became impossible to fix. With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not. (p. 327)

The Lover's Dictionary (David Levithan)

aberrant,adj. “I don’t normally do this kind of thing,” you said. “Neither do I,” I assured you. Later it turned out we had both met people online before, and we had both slept with people on first dates before, and we had both found ourselves fall too fast before. But we comforted ourselves with what we really meant to say, which was: “I don’t normally feel this good about what I’m doing.” Measure the hope of that moment, that feeling. Everything else will be measured against it. (p. 3) * aloof, adj. It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question: “What are you thinking?” It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to. (p. 11) * awhile, adv. I love the vagueness of words that involve time. It took him awhile to come back — it could be a matter of minutes or hours, days or years. It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instances that made me feel, oh, this could be right. But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There’s no pinpointing that. Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there’s no single event. There’s just the steady accumulation of awhile. (p. 24) * breathing, n. You had asthma as a child, had to carry around an inhaler. But when you grew older, it went away. You could run for miles and it was fine. Sometimes I worry that this is happening to me in reverse. The older I get, the more I lose my ability to breathe. (p. 39) * detachment, n. I still don’t know if this is a good quality or a bad one, to be able to be in the moment and then step out of it. Not just during sex, or while talking, or kissing. I don’t deliberately pull away — I don’t think I do — but I find myself suddenly on the outside, unable to lose myself in where I am. You catch me sometimes. You’ll say I’m drifting off, and I’ll apologize, trying to snap back to the present. But I should say this: Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you. (p. 71) * ineffable, adj. These words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations word cannot convey. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough. (p. 120) * love, n. I’m not even going to try. (p. 136)

#the lover's dictionary #david levithan #david #levithan

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender)

...and when she would hug me hello, I could feel how inadequate the hug was for how much she wanted to give. (p. 10)

Private Practice

There really aren’t any tricks to convincing someone that they’re not in love. It’s a remarkable emotion. Impervious to logic, turning the most measured people into risk takers willing to do anything to maintain the feeling. Is there anything greater than being in love?

And slowly, over time, everything changes. You’re not some young thing anymore, and you no longer believe in fairytales, and “perfect” isn’t in your vocabulary. And suddenly, here’s this man. And he becomes so familiar to you that one day you find yourself looking at him thinking “I could love this person for the rest of my life if I tried. And I want to try.”

It’s about joy and life and how it’s all a journey.

How It All Began (Penelope Lively)

He was one of those young who are not, in whom you spot already the older self, peering out, waiting to take over. (p. 33)

Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi)

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old – too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. For it was a mistake. Live, live!” (p. 247)

I walk down a different road, whose end I cannot foresee. I know as little about where this road leads as Alice knew when she first ran after the White Rabbit, the one who was wearing a waistcoat and a watch and muttering, “I’m late, I’m late.” (p. 267)

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again. (p. 336)

The Book of Salt (Monique Truong)

I am lonesome all the same for another voice to say my name, punctuated with a note of anticipation, a sigh of relief, a warm breath of affection. (p. 32)

Sweet Sunday Man once told me that of the five senses, the one that he most distrusts is our ability to see. It is the one most easily fooled. More often than not, he claimed, it is the heart that tells us what is and is not there. (p. 236)

The Fault in Our Stars (John Green)

(Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.) (p. 112)

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. (p. 124 - 125)

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you." (p. 153)

My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations. (p. 311)

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. (p. 313)

The Ten Year Nap (Meg Wolitzer)

Mason had recently told Amy yet another fact in his store of endless knowledge: in satellite maps of the earth, he said, you could always tell where the people were, even from great distances. Their faces, upturned slightly, gave off a shine that was like nothing else on earth -- useful in love and a liability in warfare. Humans, no matter what they did, could not hide their incandescence.

The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

I envied turtles their shells, how they could disappear at will.

“Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?” August said. “And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have more ways to say it?”

She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—”

“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.“ I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

After you get stung, you can’t get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.

“Because you weren’t ready to know. I didn’t want to risk you running away again. I wanted you to have a chance to get yourself on solid ground, get your heart bolstered up first. There a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

There is nothing perfect… There is only life.

Management Communication: A Case-Analysis Approach

Communication never stops. Even when you hang up the telephone, you're communicating the message that you have nothing more to say. Silence, in fact, can be among the more powerful forms of communication. Simply said: You cannot not communicate.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (Thomas L. Friedman)

Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world -- whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion or, most of all, a place called home. Olives trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others. We fight so intensely at times over our olives trees because, at their best, they provide the feelings of self-esteem and belonging that are as essential for human survival as food in the belly. ... You cannot be a complete person alone. You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. ... Few things are more enraging to people than to have their identity or their sense of home stripped away. They will die for it, kill for it, sing for it, write poetry for it and novelize about it. Because without a sense of home and belonging, life becomes barren and rootless. And life as a tumbleweed is no life at all.

Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)

"Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it."

"I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed."

Peony in Love (Lisa See)

In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are "if only."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)

When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.

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