The Shining Girls Quotes & Sayings

However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams. — Willa Cather

Gardens come and go, but I find myself getting attached to certain perennials. My tulips are bridesmaids, with fat faces and good posture. Hollyhocks are long necked sisters. Daffodils are young girls running out of a white church, sun shining on their heads. Peonies are pink-haired ladies, so full and stooped you have to tie them up with string. And roses are nothing but (I hate to say it) bitches
pretty show-offs who'll draw blood if you don't handle them just right.
-Vangie Galliard Nepper, From her
"Garden Diary," March 1952 — Michael Lee West

Is one of those summer evenings, when it look like night would never come, a magnificent evening, a powerful evening, rent finish paying, rations in the cupboard, twenty pounds in the bank, and a nice piece of skin waiting under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station. The sky blue, sun shining, the girls ain't have on no coats to hide the legs.
"Mummy, look at that black man!" A little child, holding on to the mother hand, look up at Sir Galahad.
"You mustn't say that, dear!" The mother chide the child. — Samuel Selvon

Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh. — Joyce Cary

The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them. — Denis Johnson

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. — Steven Pinker

When you touch deep understanding and love, you are healed. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy ... who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels ... She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had. — John Steinbeck

We can see the process of deification taking place in the Indians' perception of Mahatma Gandhi. Here we had as great a man as any the world has seen, but also full of human frailties. Not one of his four sons got on with him; one even embraced Islam to spite him. He was vain, took offence at the slightest remark against him, and a fad-ist who made nubile girls lie naked next to him to make sure that he had overcome his libidinous desires. All these failings which make him human and down to earth and yet hold him up as a shining example of a human being for all of mankind are being lost thanks to our putting him on a pedestal and worshipping him. It is time we learnt to give avatars and prophets their proper places as important historical personalities who did good to humanity. No more than that. — Khushwant Singh

And he's sorry he ever doubted the House. She's the one. One of the ones. His shining girls. — Lauren Beukes

Basically, I have one feeling ... the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away ... See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to ... walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of 'here'. — Richard Hell

Where are you from?'

'Studland.'

Suddenly, all the girls started giggling. Why did I feel like I was in the middle of a crime scene?

'Wait a second,' Isabelle said, eyes shining. 'Studland?'

'Yeah?' I asked, wondering what was so funny.

'As in "studs"?' she chuckled. — Deepika Kumaaraguru

People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time. — Milan Kundera

Tell us your secret,' the girls whisper, one toilet to another. I am that girl. I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy. I am the circus freak encased in beeswax. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame. When I get close, the step back. The cameras in their eyeholes record the zit on my chin, the rain in my eyes, the blue water under my skin. They pick up every sound on their collar microphones. They want to pull me inside of them but they're afraid. I am contagious. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Something snapped, said Madeline. She saw Perry's hand shining back in its graceful, practiced arc. She heard Bonnie's guttural voice. It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child's nanny. And then there was the sort of evil which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts. — Liane Moriarty

No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman. — Lauren Beukes

I want your hand without the skin. Bone to bone without the molds. Mouth to mouth, without the porn. — Coco J. Ginger

Lily slumped, putting her shaking hands on his shoulders. "But you will, won't you?" Pansy's voice broke into a sob.
"Yes, Pan," Galen said quietly.
"I don't like that," Pansy said. Galen stood and put his arms around the fine-boned girl, while Rose continued to comfort Lily. Oliver looked away. It was such a private moment; he hated to intrude on it. Galen was beloved by all of the sisters, but the love between him and Rose was so clear and shining that it hurt to look at them, spending their last hours together caring for the other girls. — Jessica Day George

The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. — Charles Bukowski

He says, I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity
do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it. — Emma Brockes

He pulls me to a stop in front of a stall selling steaming hot stew of beef an onions. "Two please."
"It's too expensive," I whisper to him, even though I know he won't listen.
he treats me one of his wide, gentle smiles, his dark eyes shining. "Who else am I going to spend my money on? I already know you won't let me buy you and of the pretty, frilly things girls your age like to have, and I'm not about to purchase another weapon to add to your collection."
"Because I don't like pretty, frilly things. And there's nothing wrong with having a nice collection of weapons. — C.J. Redwine

This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me. — Sue Monk Kidd

She looked ... She looked young, and- and
" I glanced down at Rossana gazing up at me, lips parted, eyes shining, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the next words I spoke were intended with no artifice at all. "She is almost as beautiful as you."
There was laughter, and I looked up, confused.
"If you wish to pay court to my daughter, Matteo, you must first speak to me," Captain dell'Orte said in mock severity.
Rossana's face colored pink.
"Elizabetta is also very beautiful," I said quickly, thinking to cover any embarassment, but also because it was true.
The adults roared with laughter.
"Now Matteo seeks to woo both girls with one compliment. — Theresa Breslin

When I was about 10, I saw Timothy Bottoms in a tele-movie called 'A Shining Season,' and it really moved me. I was maybe 8 or 9. Timothy played a runner who had cancer, and he defied the odds by coaching a girls' team to victory. — Reggie Lee

Little girls grow up thinking that knights in shining armor actually exist. But they don't. And if those valiant heroes ever did bless this world with their chivalrous deeds, I imagine, just like Christ's apostles, they were destroyed by envy on the battlefront. — Richelle E. Goodrich

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. — Charles Bukowski

Few people understood the exceptional role the civil rights movement had on the white boys and girls of the South. Bill Clinton would never have become who he was without the shining example of Martin Luther King. The same is true of Jimmy Carter and Fritz Hollings and Richard and Joe Riley. Imagine this: you're a little white kid and you watch firehoses turned on people who don't seem to be hurting anyone, and fierce dogs being tuned on young men who carry signs about freedom. We white kids grew up watching movies and TV and guess what we had learned to do? We had learned to tell the good guys from the bad guys. — Pat Conroy

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read. — Michael Korda

After the spasms die down, my arms come up around Kate, bringing our chests together and her
head against my neck. I feel her heartbeat start to return to normal. And then she's laughing, low and
satisfied.
"God ... that was so ... so ... "
Now I'm smiling too. "I know."
Earth shattering. Off the Richter Scale. Powerful enough to take out a small island country. — Emma Chase