Sharon Lynne Quotes & Sayings

[What a great way to describe how a city takes its unique "shape"...beautiful turn-of-phrase by Kieran Shields(!)]:

"It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now criss-crossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland's maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fisherman and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year. — Kieran Shields

My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch ...
Laura Acosta — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The difficulties of economics are mainly the difficulties of conceiving clearly and fully the conditions of utility. — William Stanley Jevons

Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion.
Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Others work among the spirits that have just arrived in the world of spirits. Again others raise the children who have died in infancy. Swedenborg ensures the parents of these infants that 'All children whether born within or outside of the church, are adopted by the Lord and become Angels'. — Emanuel Swedenborg

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now? — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Leaders must served and not to be served as demonstrated by Jesus Christ, the Saviour. — Lailah Gifty Akita

She'd been prepared for him to say he was too old, she must put away that sweet but impractical idea, they would forget all about it and go back to being good friends. She had almost hoped he would say that; it would forestall the complication and entanglement, yet leave her with a grief to harbor, sad but tender, grief like a secret, soothing companion. But this! There was nothing soothing about this. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Schools for love do not exist. everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively.
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love.
those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. however this love often eludes us. — Bell Hooks

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another? — Gayle Forman

How did she do it, I'd always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought - for when we realize we're actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.
Laura Acosta — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued ... was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.
the Tai Chi instructor — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

You can't make someone love you." She held out her right hand to flash a ring with a gaudy stone set in it. "But you can imprison him in a ring for not loving you. See? — David Cody Weiss

[ ... ] every guy out there gets one shot per woman in a lifetime [ ... ] — Alice Walsh

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Reading teaches us receptivity ... It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan ... And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I was the angriest little person imaginable when I was younger. I woke up with a frown every morning. I barely talked, wore black all the time and had some serious teenage rebellion years — Holly Marie Combs

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon. — Henry A. Kissinger

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You need other people to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might just be a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, but it must be so. She knew other people were real by thinking about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, were proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head? — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than an actual statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Yet I have come to distrust book jackets calculated to prick desire like a Bloomingdale's window, as if you could wear what you read. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. It was what I used to do through long evenings. Never mornings even to one so self-indulgent, it seems slightly sinful to wake up and immediately sit down with a book and afternoons only now and then. In daylight I would pay what I owed the world. Reading was the reward, a solitary, obscure, nocturnal reward. It was what I got everything else (living) out of the way in order to do. Now the lack was taking its toll. I was having withdrawal symptoms. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

What I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried. — Lynne Sharon Schwartz