Anne > Books: family‎ (54)

He moved a bit closer, and raised his chair so that he was almost at eye level. ‘That’s why you piss me off, Clark. Because I see all this talent, all this … ’ He shrugged. ‘This energy and brightness, and –’
‘Don’t say potential …’
‘ … potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life

I couldn’t see anything beyond Will by then. I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to Thomas. ‘It’s like I’m looking through a funnel,’ she had said, gazing at his newborn form. ‘The world has just shrunk to me and him.’ -Lou Clark

‘I would fight for you two, for Thomas, until my dying breath.’
-Josie Clark

END OF REVIEW

You don’t have to think he’s right. But you do have to be there.

‘Hey, Clark,’ he said. ‘Tell me something good.’

I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

There are so many people here that it seems like every mealtime someone is glimpsing me for the first time, gaping as though they’ve never seen anything as bizarre. As though we’re not all missing some pieces.

I could feel the window through which I viewed the world—no larger than a pinhole back then—broadening somewhere at the back of my mind just by looking at him. I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough. I wanted to stare at him for lifetimes, the perfect pores of him, his high eyebrows serene, like he’d never seen how angry God could be.

Jude taught me what love was: to be willing to hold on to another person’s pain. That’s it.

“It’s different for you,” I say. “You make them scared.”
“Then give them something to be afraid of,” she says. “You’re a badass bitch. You’ve done way worse than half these girls.”

I cast my eyes at the other bodies, I see skin tarnished with small holes of cigarette burns and pink puckered knife wounds and white lines like hash marks on forearms. Here, my scars are the only part of me that could be called normal. It seems like every girl here has had their own personal Prophet.

"God is always both alive and dead. His great sorrow is dying, always dying.”
“Who is God’s mother?” asked Deacon Sean.
“Her identity is inconsequential. Her only purpose is the duty her womb performs in growing the body of God. That is truly the highest calling of womankind. Any of you should be lucky enough to birth God.” -the fraudster the priest

“I guess people can’t be content without answers, even if they’re wrong. We’d rather have a lie than a question that we can never know the answer to.”

Earlier that night, I’d fought with Vivienne, my father’s third wife. I’d dropped a dish during washing, and she stuck out her rigid finger and gave me that tired old lecture about how it was almost time for me to marry and no man would want me if I didn’t arrange myself into the shape of a good woman. “Fine, then I won’t marry!” I said, and she reminded me that the job of a Kevinian woman was to marry. If a woman doesn’t marry, what’s the purpose of her? I threw down my dishrag right then, because I knew everybody else agreed with her.

Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my birthplace

Boney looked up brightly from her notes: “Can you tell me what your wife’s blood type is?” she asked.
“Uh, no, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your wife’s blood type?”
“Maybe O?” I guessed.

I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.

IN CONCLUSION: THIS WHOLE BOOK IS A GREAT ENORMOUS LIE. I KNOW NOW IT WAS ALL A MIRAGE.

He had already cheated me in one world war but would later be put into another (as a perverse kind of reward), where he would somehow manage to avoid me again.

To most people, Hans Hubermann was barely visible. An un-special person. Certainly, his painting skills were excellent. His musical ability was better than average. Somehow, though, and I'm sure you've met people like this, he was able to appear as merely part of the background, even if he was standing at the front of a line. He was always just there . Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable.

The first time we were in the vicinity of each other Hans was twenty-two years old, fighting in France. The majority of young men in his platoon were eager to fight. Hans wasn't so sure. I had taken a few of them along the way, but you could say I never even came close to touching Hans Hubermann. He was either too lucky, or he deserved to live, or there was a good reason for him to live.

You see? Even death has a heart.

He was the crazy one who
had painted himself black and defeated the world.
She was the book thief without the words.

I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men . They are not . They're running at me.

She was a girl. In Nazi Germany.
How fitting that she was discovering the power of words.

...and they never saw Arthur Berg again. As for me, I
can tell you that I most definitely saw him.

Not many men are lucky enough to cheat me twice.

Where's the fight? he wondered.
Where's the will to hold on?

Exactly what kind of people Hans and Rosa Hubermann were was not the easiest problem to solve. Kind people? Ridiculously ignorant people? People of questionable sanity?
What was easier to define was their predicament.

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...
I am haunted by humans.

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS FROM MAX VANDENBURG
"Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands."

A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice.

I am haunted by humans.

HOT DAMN.
LIKE DAAAAAAMN.
I HEREBY NOMINATE SHAZI FOR THE Heroine of The Year Award
YOU KNOW THAT SONG 'DONT CHA' by The pussycat dolls?--don't cha wish

HOT DAMN.
LIKE DAAAAAAMN.
I HEREBY NOMINATE SHAZI FOR THE Heroine of The Year Award
YOU KNOW THAT SONG 'DONT CHA' by The pussycat dolls?--don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me...(it's really catchy)
THAT'S HER ANTHEM RIGHT THERE.
I HAVE A GIRL CRUSH RIGHT NOW.

LET'S GOSSIP

I TUMBLED OUT OF BED LAUGHING.
I'M PRACTICALLY TEARING UP.
THE GIRL IS AN ARTIST. WITTY AND ELOQUENT.

LET'S NOT FORGET SHE'S ONLY 16 YEARS OLD
HMPH

"I never felt so small, so humbled, by the vastness of the universe and the fragility of life. "

BUT YOU'RE NOT SO INNOCENT NOW FRAERA, ARE YOU?

GIRL YOU NEED A LIFE

I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I DROPPED THIS BOOK OUT OF SHOCK AND SHEER PERPLEXITY.

Hermes shrugged. “Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related, for better or worse … and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum.”