Words of Wisdom Wednesday

Springtime

 

            “When spring came, even the false spring, 
        there were no problems except where to be happiest.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Happy Saturday!

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are.”

--Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Happy Saturday!

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

— E.E. Cummings

Happy Saturday!

"The nighttime sky is all about yesterday. The light that you're seeing from the stars happened millions of years ago. Looking at the night sky is like looking at the past. But the morning sky, on the other hand, is right now. It is in the present and holds the hope of a brand-new day and so many new opportunities-- to live, to be happy."

--Robin Schwarz, Night Swimming

Happy Saturday!

"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”

--Azar Nafisi  

My brother moved to Maryland on Thursday to go to grad school, so this quote hits so close to home right now. I'm so happy and proud of him, but it's still going to be hard to adjust not seeing him everyday. Good luck on your adventure, brother!

Happy Saturday

“Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—-just the two of you.”


--E.B. White

Also sending a huge HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my sister who turns the big 3-0 today!!

Happy Saturday

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Saturday

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

--Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Happy Saturday!

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it to our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Happy Saturday!

"Then there came a faraway, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the center of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly, 'you see, I am fate,' it shouted, 'and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your controls, the condiment in the dish of life.'"

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl

Happy Saturday

"Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure"

 --F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Summer At Tiffany

"So there we were, baking in the sun, waiting endlessly for lonely midshipmen to stop by. We didn't see a single one. Should have known. Guys don't hang around libraries on the weekend."

--Marjorie Hart, Summer at Tiffany



I saw this book laying on the kitchen table last week while my sister was visiting, and I spontaneously picked it up and started reading it. Not really planning on reading it, just maybe the first page. But then the first page turned into the first chapter, and the first chapter turned into the second chapter and I couldn't put it down. I half jokingly asked my sister if she would leave it for me to read and to my surprise, after she had left to go home, I saw it sitting on the dining room table. I quickly texted her asking if she had meant to leave it. She just responded, "you have 3 days to read it" (that was when my parents were leaving to visit her and she was expecting the book to be coming too) That was on Sunday, and needless to say, I just finished it (Wednesday).

It's a memoir of a woman's best summer ever. The summer of 1945 when two college-aged friends moved from Iowa to New York City and got jobs at Tiffany's. It's everything you could ask for (or at least I could ask for)in a book: 1940's, World War II, Tiffany's, gallivanting around the city with a handsome young Navy officer. And it was all true, that's the kicker. You get to read about their summer job at Tiffany's, with customers such as Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich among others, seeing the Queen Mary sail into the New York harbor, and being in the midst of Time Square on VJ Day. It's a life experience we all wish we could say was ours. Personally, I could sit and listen to people from that era tell stories for hours.

I've never done a book review on this blog, aside from some random quotes I post, but I just felt like recommending this book to you. Aside from the fact that my sister was nice enough to let me borrow it, and that it felt good to be reading a book again and not be on the computer for once, but because it just made me happy and I wanted to pass it along to you. If you read it, let me know what you think!

Happy Saturday

"Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."

--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

have a favorite quote? Email it to me!

Happy Saturday

"As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed."

--Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

have a favorite literature quote? email it to me!

Happy Saturday

"Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road."    -- Jack Kerouac, The Road

Happy Saturday

"Light streamed through one of the windows and across her face and I have never seen anything or anyone so beautiful in my life. If my heart had stopped at that moment I would have fallen happy and fallen full and I would have seen in life all that I had wanted to see and all that I needed to see. Fall. Let me fall."

--Jame Frey, A Million Little Pieces

Happy Saturday

"Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in his heart."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate




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Do you have a favorite literature quote? Email it to me!

Happy Saturday

"But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in it's turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all it's penalties."

--Kenneth Grahme, The Wind in the Willows



Do you have a favorite literature quote? Email it to me!


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Words of Wisdom Wednesday