Air Quotes (page 15)
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Who are you writing to, Linus?"This is the time of year to write to the Great Pumpkin. On Halloween Night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children!"You must be crazy! When are you going to stop believing in something that isn't true?"When *you* stop believing in that fellow with a red suit and the white beard who goes, 'Ho, ho, ho!'" "We're obviously separated by denominational differences.
Charles M. Schulz
I trembled to think of a world without stars. No guide for the sailor to trust at see, no jewels to dazzle our sense of beauty [...] But all around the globe, the air is so dirty and the lights from the cities are so bright that for some people few stars can be seen anymore. A generation of children may grow up seeing a blank sky and asking, "Did there used to be stars there?
Michael Jackson
I must passed the crest a while ago. And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know, But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown. And the morning I thought how proud I should be. To stand there straight as a queen, Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me. But the air was dull; there was little I could have seen. It was nearly level along the beaten track. And the brambles caught in my gown. But it's no use now to think of turning back,...
Sara Teasdale
This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe's shrieking nightmares that they woudl begin to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.
Joseph Heller
We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
Virginia Woolf
She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the...
Margaret Atwood
The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.
Peter Ackroyd
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.
John Steinbeck