Ethique Discount Quotes & Sayings

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68] — Anne Lamott

They washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. "Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up. "They are very much mixed." "They are all yours," said she, very prettily, — Thomas Hardy

There seems little or no hope for the adult writer who produces sentences like these: "Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time." The phrase "Her cheeks were thick and smooth" is normal English, but "[Her cheeks] held a healthy natural red color" is elevated, pseudo-poetic. The word "held" faintly hints at personification of "cheeks," and "healthy natural red color" is clunky, stilted, slightly bookish. The second sentence contains similar mistakes. The diction level of "extended to the intersection of her lips" is high and formal, in ferocious conflict with the end of the sentence, which plunges to the colloquial "most of the time. — John Gardner

Who had been fighting with someone they loved?
Going at it long enough to unleash the irretrievable words they knew to say only because they had been trusted to know what would hurt the most. — Bill Clegg

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name ... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase. — James Fenton