Quotes from Cathleen Schine

Dress you? I'd rather undress you. We don't belong together. But you belong to me. I want you not as you might be. I want you as you are.

Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them.

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire.

It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?

Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls.

Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square.

The garden stretched out in a soft drift, colors jumbled any way, an unmade bed of red and yellow and pink. Then came the trees. Apple, plum, and the Japanese black pine.

He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.

The word is "love," the story tells her, but she says No, that is nonsense. "Love" is a four-letter word, the story says, but Sally says, No, you are missing the point. There is no word, just words, lots and lots of them, a universe of words, galaxies of them

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

Lines of gulls standing on glassy blue patches of wet sand.

They ate and picked sand from their chicken in the pink light.

Butterfield Blues Band, Vanilla Fudge...

There were not words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify. Words were meant to communicate and and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way.

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

Arthur took me for granted, she thought. And I took him for granted. That is the point of marriage. That's what marriage is.

Word retrieval emergency

His point is, informal English is not wrong, and some of it stems from models older than 'standard' English, and he always puts 'standard' in quotes because there is no standard English, language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it, you have to know what is actually spoken.

The physical beauty of Venice and the moral ugliness of America were more and more difficult for Julian to reconcile.

How can you know things have changed, Julian, if you don't know how things were?

History so often is. Especially when it's not history but is now.

She thought of all the Black soldiers who came back from the war and found the same dangerous, inhospitable place they'd left, changed but unchanged for them.

The land of opportunity seized and given to someone else.