Carol Birch Quotes

It's one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It's like looking at the future. ~ Carol Birch

It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen. ~ Carol Birch

One goes, or we all die ~ Carol Birch

It was then I truly realised the whale is no more a fish than I am. So much blood. This was not like the fish on the quay, fresh caught, lying flipping and flopping, death on a simmer. This was a fierce, boiling death. She died thrashing blindly in a slick of gore, full of pain and fury, gnashing her jaws, beating her tail, spewing lumps of slime and half-digested fish that fell stinking about us. It was vile. So much strength dies slowly. ~ Carol Birch

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The birch trees loom ahead like a brotherhood of ghosts. ~ Lisa Ann Sandell

Send love and move on. It's time to walk away from people and experiences that hold you back from living and loving your life. ~ Carol 'CC' Miller

I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. ~ Mary Karr

Tell me,' I said. 'Tell me when you notice me.'
I notice you going into church,' Joshua said. 'I notice your hair, how blond it is. But how in some light it looks like it has red in it. I notice the way you smell when we're close. And the way you walk when we're headed home from church and your family gets out of the Temple first. I notice how you are with your family and how you hold your little sisters. I've seen you stand out on your doorstep and look across the desert. I've watched you walk toward the Compound fence and then on past that. You've been walking for years. ~ Carol Lynch Williams

I was watching Maury Povich the other day. He had these people on who say that they've had near death experiences. Do you ever notice they always say the same thing? 'I remember seeing this really bright, white light.' It's like, of course, you pinhead, it's the paramedic looking in your pupils with a penlight. ~ Carol Leifer

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited
long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms
what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling. ~ Alain De Botton

There's a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone activity that you're doing. The image would include being curled up somewhere on a rainy day and you're reading very intensely involved in a world that no one can see because it's inside your head. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol- ~ Patricia Highsmith

We're number one in domestic violence homicides. We also have a high rate of alcohol abuse and drug abuse and there's a high lethality rate when you get those factors involved, so the shelter has 52 beds, certainly it is never empty. ~ Diane Birch

My grandmother and I would go see movies, and we'd come back to the apartment - we had a one-room apartment in Hollywood - and I would kind of lock myself in this little dressing room area with a cracked mirror on the door and act out what I had just seen. ~ Carol Burnett

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours
~ Carol Rifka Brunt

Moving your asshole-mouth & YES SIR I am saying NO MA'AM I am saying. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

That's one of those snapshot moments. I don't know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

The John Birch Society is Communism's greatest ally. With its help we will divide and confuse the American people until they have lost faith in their Government, their nation has ceased to be a major world power, and their country is ripe for revolution. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

My husband doesn't listen because his mother didn't make him listen. What am I going to do, beat him? I mean: firstborn of a southern family? Firstborn boy? Please. I mean, I love him to death, but is he going to take the garbage out? No. ~ Carol Bartz

Carol turned around quickly as if stifling an urge to lunge at Max. He turned back to Max, straining to appear genial. "Okay," he said, "but will you come over here and put your head in my mouth again?"
Max continued to back up, "No, Carol. I don't want to right now. ~ Dave Eggers

Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? ~ Carol Shields

loaded wagons with tents, sent out to his outlying estates ~ Carol McGrath

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it!
that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms
nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member - yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged. ~ Carol D. Leonnig

I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Character, the sportswriters said. They know it when they see it - it's the ability to dig down and find the strength even when things are going against you. ~ Carol S. Dweck

you aren't a failure until you start to blame. What ~ Carol S. Dweck

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. ~ Carol Bishop Hipps

So sometimes it is an outright manipulation like that, but most of the time I'm just, I'm creating a mood that is a place of comfort for the person and a way for our dialogue to be more fluid. ~ Carol Friedman