You know where to find me - Rachel Cohn

I preferred books to people. Laura was my exception. We had out own secret language, nonsense words to communicate when adults were present. Me-oh-my-oh-milo, eh foo manchu mysteryahoyatolah, in the car ride back from gymnastics class, could translate as, " Miles, since I'm allowed to check out more then two books a week from the library, I snuck some Nancy Drews into the tree house for you." Aiieeee, hersheyhialeaLauraho spaghetti-o-sautus was easily understood as "I swiped some chocolate bars for us from 7-Eleven, Laura. Meet you up there after dinner." 

The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (3)

I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.
---


Outside in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, "It's so bitter."
"What, Mama?"
"Old age."

Every you, every me - David Levithan (3)

"What is the answer, Ewan?" Ms. Granger asked.

Giraffe, I wanted to answer. It was on the tip on my tounge.
Giraffe.
This was in math class.

Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (3)

He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there were people who'd completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time - not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age then, say, the Me Decade. Well, this kid, was some twenty years to late. He was the on with thick brown hair that flyingsaucered over an eye, the one who inspired girls to make their own prom dress, the one from the country club. And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequin glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but no one would know, because if you weren't born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle, unresolved, in oblivion, confused and unrealized. (Pour some sugar on him and blame it on the rain.)

Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (2)

"Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes throughout the filming of Casablanca" someone said. I turned , expecting to see a mother circling Dad like a hooded Vulture eyeing carrion, but it wasn't. It was she, the woman from Fat Kat Foods. She was tall, wearing skintight jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, and large black sunglasses on her head. Her dark brown hair hung idly around her face.
"Though he wasn't Einstein or Truman," she said, "I don't think history would be the same without him. Especially if he had to look up at Ingrid Bergman and say, 'Here's looking at you, kid.' "

Every you, every me - David Levithan (2)

Instead I thought about the world profile and that a weird double meaning it had. We say we're looking at a person's profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it's the whole them we're seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you're not only seeing half the face. Like with Sparrow, whoever he was. It's never the way you would remember seeing them, You never remember someone in profile. You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.

The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (2)

The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural form dominated almost entirely by a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of woman read fiction. Most men don't. Woman read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does." The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at the time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B's, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.

Every you, Every me - David Levithan (1)

My mind became a brief history of empty boxes.
The big cardboard ones I'd find as a kind and turn into a fort. Or a house, drawing in windows on the sides. I would cut out the windows and ruin it.
Boxes that sweaters would come in. Boxes from department stores that I would keep in the bottom of my closet until they could be filled with some kind of collection.
Coffins.
The Cracker Jack box when I was all done, when the prize had been revealed to be something plastic, something worthless.
An empty sandbox, looking like it was waiting for sand.
A mailbox always looks like it's full of envelopes. But you never know for sure. Most of the time when you open it, it sounds hollow.
What did Pandora do with her box after she'd unleashed despair into the world? Did she keep it on her mantel, as a reminder of what she's done? 

Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (1)

[...] but then I did start to notice all kinds of unquestionable bleak things. For example, when Bethany brought people into her room for a Friday night Audrey Hepburn marathon, I was distinctly aware, at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's, unlike the other girls sitting on pillows chain-smoking with tears in their eyes, I actually found myself hoping Holly didn't find Cat. No, if I was completely honest with myself, I realized I wanted Cat to stay lost and abandoned, mewing and shivering all by its Cat self in those splintery crates in that awful Tin Pan Alleyway, which from the rate of that Hollywood downpour would be submerged under the Pacific Ocean in less then an hour. (This I disguised, of course, smiling gaily when George Peppard feverishly grasped Audrey feverishly grasping Cat who no longer looked like a cat but a drowned squirrel. I believed I even uttered one of those girly, high-pitched, "Ewws," in perfect harmony with Bethany's sighs.

The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (1)

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless, an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank. We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, an the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay.