Cellophane Quotes

One boy took a peppermint from a woman's satin evening clutch but first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane. ~ Ann Patchett

Muslim Girlhood

I never found myself in a pink aisle.
There was no box for me
with glossy cellophane like heat
and a neat packet of instructions in six languages.

Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed.
I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the other - no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and punctual resolution waiting.

I took tests in which Jane & William had so many apples.

I fasted through birthday parties
and Christmas parties
and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables,
picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain.

I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue.
I hungered for Jell-O & Starburts & margarine;
could read mono- and diglycerides by five,
knew what gelatin meant, and
where it came from. ~ Leila Chatti

ached, until his head throbbed, all of that preparation comes down to today. It's finally here! He quickly brushes his teeth and puts on his Halloween costume. He picks up the trombone case and his school backpack and heads downstairs quietly, not wanting to wake his mother. He rips open the cellophane and drops two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and pours himself a glass of milk. He drinks the milk but doesn't touch the pastries. ~ James Patterson

Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hairsprays. That why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions."
"Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked."
"Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that Dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr Becnel one of the martyrs of our age. The poor man was badly victimized. Now run along to the front door and see if my taxi has arrived." p.306 ~ John Kennedy Toole

My DVD cellophane was put on by a psychiatrist. It was shrink-wrapped. ~ Tim Vine

American Danish can be doughy, heavy, sticky, tasting of prunes and is usually wrapped in cellophane. Danish Danish is light, crisp, buttery and often tastes of marzipan or raisins; it is seldom wrapped in anything but loving care. ~ R. W. Apple

The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.
"By telling you my life's story.
"See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:
TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!
or
BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!
"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday.
"I am tomorrow. ~ Aravind Adiga

... two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in cellophane ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I don't work in places with papier-mâché and cellophane hearts. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions. ~ John Kennedy Toole

When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane. ~ Tom Waits

He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them. ~ Rupert Thomson

But I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern-California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them. ~ Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

In the bathroom two water tumblers were sealed in cellophane sacks with the words: "These glasses are sterilized for your protection." Across the toilet seat a strip of paper bore the message: "This seat has been sterilized with ultraviolet light for your protection." Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible. ~ John Steinbeck

A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, "Its wings are like cellophane," and I say, "I was just thinking that," but Jonah says, "Just thinking what?" so maybe I just thought he'd said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I've noticed it before. ~ David Mitchell

The still waters
Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack. ~ Sylvia Plath

Well, any love makes us vulnerable. Whatever we love will give the gift of pain somewhere along the road. But who would live sealed in spiritual cellophane just to keep from ever being hurt? There are a few people like that. I'm sorry for them. I think they are as good as dead. ~ Gladys Taber

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path - people, houses, factories, cars - would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth's surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light - the brightest ever seen by human eyes - followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its ~ Bill Bryson

It's all like an ocean! cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

There were glamorous young men with dyed hair who rustled like old cellophane. Older men had airs of sophistication and cold grace, giving the impression that if they were not so terribly tired they would go to places (known only to a select few) where the conversation was more scintillating and the congregation more interesting.

There were young women who had the exotic sheen of recently fed forest animals. Although they moved their fine heads languorously this way and that, nothing in the room excited their appetites. Unfashionable red lips cut across their white faces, and the crimson fingernails, as pointed as surgical instruments, heightened the predatory effect. Older, sadder women were more interesting to me. Voluminous skirts and imported shawls did not hide their heavy bodies, nor was their unattractiveness shielded by the clanks of chains and ribbons of beads, or by pale pink lips and heavily drawn doe eyes. Their presence among the pretty people enchanted me. It was like seeing frogs buzzed by iridescent dragonflies. ~ Maya Angelou

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green ...
And I can't even help myself, I start laughing - I'm laughing and laughing and
laughing like an absolute crazy person, until the tears track down my face, because it has
to be a sign. I can't believe it's anything less. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Of course.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone
The words echo in my mind, making it ache all over again. She's gone.
Don't go, don't go, don't go - I hate those words, I hate the magnetic pull of whatever it is I've forgotten, the regret waiting to make itself known. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to "wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane" for later artistic use and notes that "this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people. ~ Winifred Gallagher

To her dismay, they were the kind of peppermints that are each wrapped in a little bit of cellophane. Placing her hands underneath the table, she unwrapped three peppermints, using the utmost - the word 'utmost.' when it is used here means 'most' - care not to make any of those crinkling noises that come from unwrapping a candy and are so annoying in movie theaters. ~ Lemony Snicket

Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub? ~ Norton Juster

As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork's worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac's posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen's discount. ~ Richard Price

When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother - a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now ... and now we're in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.' ~ Kate Williams

They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle
or a can or a box or a cellophane bag
then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature ... An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with only three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable. ~ Michael Moore

It was the day without a yesterday, and the world was so new the paint was still wet on the flowers, the meadows were wrapped up in a glossy cellophane of dew, and freshly budded leaves dangled like shiny price-tags from the trees. ~ Jaxy Mono

We melt; we tear and rip apart. Membrane, baby. Cellophane. Ain't that some shit. ~ David Rabe

Flower Herding On Mount Monadnock

In the forest I discover a flower.

The invisible life of the thing
Goes up in flames that are invisible,
Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.

It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.

In its covertness it has a way
Of uttering itself in place of itself,
Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean,

A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.

The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying. ~ Galway Kinnell

It always puzzled me how some of the people who think killing and eating animals in the wild is somehow cruel have no problem buying dead animals at the grocery store, wrapped in cellophane instead of fur. ~ Sarah Palin

I wanted to tell you this, too: consciousness is a bad thing. Consciousness is a dead thing. Free yourselves from consciousness! It is high time. All that is needed is to strip off this garment: nothing very difficult about that. Tear the skin from your body, for it is not a true skin, it is a cellophane tissue that blocks the pores, that asphyxiates. Peel the tissue off, peel it off. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Paralytic

It happens. Will it go on? ----
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung

That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not

Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Tapestries of eyes,

Lights,
The soft anonymous
Talkers: 'You all right?'
The starched, inaccessible breast.

Dead egg, I lie
Whole
On a whole world I cannot touch,
At the white, tight

Drum of my sleeping couch
Photographs visit me ----
My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,
Mouth full of pearls,

Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.'
The still waters
Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack.
On my bare back

I smile, a buddha, all
Wants, desire
Falling from me like rings
Hugging their lights.

The claw
Of the magnolia,
Drunk on its own scents,
Asks nothing of life. ~ Sylvia Plath