And Off Quotes (page 95)
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
Alice Munro
So she learned ways of conserving bits of seconds. Long before the train ground to a stop at her station, she pushed her way to the door to be one of the first expelled when it slid open. Out of the train, she ran like a deer, circling the crowd to be the first up the stairs leading to the street. Walking to the office, she kept close to the buildings so she could turn corners sharply. She crossed streets kittycorner to save stepping off and on an extra pair of curbs. At the building,...
Betty Smith
Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he had long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of...
Michael Chabon
Simons, as restrained as Bradlee could be hard-charging and obstreperous, liked to tell of watching Bradlee grind his cigarrettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party. Bradlee was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein
The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.” The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian’s adventures with 256th Squadron. It’s the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it...
Joseph Heller
When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and thousands of dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a single price of $6,500.
Walter Isaacson
Love is like the little red toy wagon you get for your Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can't leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster
Mario Puzo
It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would heisitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young.
Katherine Dunn
I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed...and as it was for me when I was young and...
A. Whitney Brown
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self? a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama?...
William Styron