Christmas Vacation Italian Twinkle Lights Quotes

Whatever he does should be seen as working at the Presidency and if he goes to Colorado for Christmas, it should be for a minimum amount of time, the family tradition and family get-together aspect emphasized, and it be seen as a working vacation. ~ Robert Teeter

In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead. Trevor was probably spending his Christmas vacation with some woman in Hawaii or Bali or Tulum. He was probably fingering her at that very moment, telling her he loved her. He might actually be happy. I shut the window and lowered all the blinds. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

I don't know what to say, except it's Christmas and we're all in misery. ~ Beverly D'Angelo

So,Batman,eh?"
Effing St. Clair.
I cross my arms and slouch into one of the plastic seats. I am so not in the mood for this.He takes the chair next to me and drapes a relaxed arm over the back of the empty seat on his other side. The man across from us is engrossed in his laptop,and I pretend to be engrossed in his laptop,too. Well,the back of it.
St. Clair hums under his breath. When I don't respond,he sings quietly. "Jingle bells,Batman smells,Robin flew away..."
"Yes,great,I get it.Ha ha. Stupid me."
"What? It's just a Christmas song." He grins and continues a bit louder. "Batmobile lost a wheel,on the M1 motorway,hey!"
"Wait." I frown. "What?"
"What what?"
"You're singing it wrong."
"No,I'm not." He pauses. "How do you sing it?"
I pat my coat,double-checking for my passport. Phew. Still there. "It's 'Jingle bells, Batman smells,Robin laid an egg'-"
St. Clair snorts. "Laid an egg? Robin didn't lay an egg-"
"'Batmobile lost a wheel,and the Joker got away.'"
He stares at me for a moment,and then says with perfect conviction. "No."
"Yes.I mean,seriously,what's up with the motorway thing?"
"M1 motorway. Connects London to Leeds."
I smirk. "Batman is American. He doesn't take the M1 motorway."
"When he's on holiday he does."
"Who says Batman has time to vacation?"
"Why are we arguing about Batman?" He leans forward. "You're derailing us from the real topic.The fact that you, Anna Olip ~ Stephanie Perkins

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator's mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here's spring. ~ Richard Powers

Mind if I ask you another question?" I said.
"Go ahead," he replied.
I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. "How come…how come it took you so long to call me?" I couldn't help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I'd ever asked him.
He looked in my direction, then back toward the road.
"You don't have to tell me," I said. And he didn't. But I'd wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we'd met in the smoky bar and the night he'd finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother's wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn't know about?
I was a girl. I simply had to know. ~ Ree Drummond

The mind is like a circuit of
Christmas tree lights. When the
brain works well, all of the lights
twinkle brilliantly, and it's adaptable
enough that, often, even if one bulb
goes out, the rest will still shine on.
But depending on where the
damage is, sometimes that one
blown bulb can make the whole
strand go dark. ~ Susannah Cahalan

... a slipstream of darkness so complete it helps illuminate the evening sky. It's like somebody dropped a dome over the ocean & lit it up with Christmas lights. ...Sans moon, Norfolk is wrapped in a mantle of pure, unadulterated blackness, leaving the stars to twinkle in harmony above. It thoroughly disorientates me. ~ Tim Latham

I once found myself conspiring with a British Cabinet Minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty's Treasury to cough up more money for the British Travel advertising in America. Said he, "Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in the cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer." Damn right. ~ David Ogilvy

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up. ~ Michael Dirda

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments - often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we're too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times we're so afraid of the dark that we don't dare let ourselves enjoy the light. A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable. I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith. ~ Brene Brown

I had spent enough time in France to know that the words 'chez moi' meant something a thousand times more profound than one's current home. 'Chez moi' was the place your parents came from, or maybe even the region of your parents' parents. The food you ate at Christmas, your favorite kind of cheese, your best childhood memories of summer vacation -- all of these derived from 'chez moi.' And even if you had never lived there, 'chez moi' was knitted into your identity; it colored the way you viewed the world and the way the world viewed you. ~ Ann Mah

I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the galley reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. I was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I let the curtains fall back against the glass, effectively blocking the view of my nemesis standing there beneath the twinkle lights, looking way too hot in his charcoal-colored suit.
It would be so much easier to hate him if he didn't look so good. And I want to hate him; I really do. ~ Kristi Cook

While all the universe and my family are still sleeping, I will walk among the red and blue twinkle-lights of the living room, to sit and gaze upon the pretty white angel atop the tree and say silent prayers, remembering what was good in the world and why I was brought here to remember. ~ Carew Papritz

Sometimes you're just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one. ~ Haruki Murakami

VIEW FROM A HILL
I am not yet quite over it.
I am lying down on top of it.
Surveying behind me a wasteland
Of dried-up promise.
While the lights below twinkle
With dull mocking uncertainty.
There isn't much left to look forward to,
And the looking forward of the past has been belied. ~ John Tottenham

Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely. ~ Frank McCourt

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.
-Stephen Dedalus- ~ James Joyce

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

You stare down your opponent, lights twinkle, but you don't blink. This is all you and that's all him, and it ain't all that much. An instant later you wake up in a hospital. Your anus hurts. Long live sports. ~ Jarod Kintz

For two months after Christmas vacation we limped around campus with muscles too tigh and sore to walk properly, yet we had no good idea of our goal. Without knowing what a real race was like, I couldn't judge whether it was worth all the preparation, but having put in so much time already, how could we back out? Quite a few Freshman did manage to back out. After Christmas several, when freed from faily practice, decided that they liked not feeling tired all the time. Most of them vanished without a word. ~ Stefan Kieszling

Brain, maybe you should take a brief vacation. Take two aspirin and sit on the bench. Someone just smacked a line drive up the middle of the heart. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

When the lights went out.
It wasn't just the lights. So many things about his physical situation changed all at once that his hindbrain couldn't keep up. It told him to be nauseated just in case he'd been poisoned. It was working with fifty-million-year-old response algorithms. ~ James S.A. Corey

We find our own way to right action, and tread it as we go. He who tells his neighbour what he, the neighbour, should do in given circumstances is a fool. He does not and he cannot know. 'If I were you' is a silly beginning to any remark. You are not, and you never will be anyone else. Mind your own business; it is, or should be, a full-time task for twenty-four hours a day. ~ Christmas Humphreys

We're raising our girls to understand the real meaning of Christmas, and to know that it's most important to have Christmas in your heart. We go to our local mall and donate toys, and we say prayers for all the people in the world who might not be as lucky as we are. ~ Faith Hill

Why science? Many people, with the best intentions, like to give parents advice about raising a child, including parents, non-parents, health visitors, friends, celebrities, bloggers and next-door neighbours. Unfortunately, much of this advice can be completely wrong or based on archaic ideas and practices that have since been disproved or debunked. Some of this advice can even be damaging. In addition, some parents say that they advocate using 'common sense' or 'intuition' in raising their children, but what do those things mean? How is intuition classified, when it differs so greatly from one person to another? Some people do the 'common sense' thing only to find out it was wrong later in life, which is why it is altogether better to be guided by the latest scientific research. In order to learn how to filter the good advice from the bad, I believe that new parents need science-based evidence in their corner. You'll find it in this book. ~ Zion Lights

That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

At some point, Jesper realized Kaz was gone.
"Not one for goodbyes, is he?" he muttered.
"He doesn't say goodbye," Inej said. She kept her eyes on the lights of the canal. Somewhere in the garden, a night bird began to sing. "He just lets go. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The Time Around Scars:
A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.

And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is a medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us. ~ Michael Ondaatje

The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Christmas makes me happy no matter what time of year it comes around. ~ Bryan White

I never had good hair growing up - just had the worst nothing hair - and until I started being rough with it, even 'til this day I'm actually pretty rough with it, and ever since I've been like that it's been pretty darn good to me. ~ Lights

No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused ~ Charles Dickens

She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. ~ Catherynne M Valente

There was nothing to see but the endless procession of tail-lights and headlights – rubies and diamonds was how Gran had described them to me as a child. ~ Melanie Casey

At Christmas, we remember God's gift to us by giving gifts to each other. ~ Catherine Palmer

All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren't so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa.
The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari- a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island's cherished cephalopod. And Palermo's most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky- Palermo in a single bite. ~ Matt Goulding

Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off. ~ Denis Diderot

The functionaries of public power rarely strengthen in their dispositions to abridge it, and an unorganized call for timely amendment is not likely to prevail against an organized opposition to it. We are always told that things are going on well; Why change them? 'Chi sta bene, no si mueve,' said the Italian, 'let him who stands well, stand still.' This is true; and I verily believe they would go on well with us under an absolute monarch, while our present character remains, of order, industry and love of peace, and restrained as he would be, by the proper spirit of the people. ~ Thomas Jefferson

So that's the challenge for me and that has always been the challenge - finding that melody, that riff, that thing that just lights me up and makes me feel like it's Christmas. ~ Steve Vai

Every morning Papa brought in another pile of firewood and vines from the apple tree. Mama said they should keep busy knitting Papa's Christmas presents. Josie finished Papa's scarf and made one for Mama too. Katrina worked on Mama's pincushion, but she just couldn't concentrate on knitting Papa's socks while he sawed and hacked away at the apple tree. She had ripped out the heel and started over so many times that she had all but ruined the yarn from Mrs. Wooly.
"Well, I'll miss the old apple tree," said Mama, "but it will keep us warm this long winter."
"Yes, I'm thankful for the firewood," said Papa.
How could he be thankful, thought Katrina. Didn't he know that he was chopping up her studio? Didn't he know he was ruining her drawing board? Didn't he know she couldn't draw unless she were in the apple tree? ~ Trinka Hakes Noble

You ever seen A Christmas Story? You know toward the end when Ralphie beats the ever-loving shit out of the bully? I hope to God you've seen it. Because then you'll know exactly what I mean when I say I'm about to go real fucking Ralphie on this son of a bitch. ~ Emma Chase

Bambini!" Uncle Monty cried out from the front door. "Come along, bambini!"
The Baudelaire orphans raced back through the hedges to where their new guardian was waiting for them. "Violet, Uncle Monty," Violet said. "My name is Violet, my brother's is Klaus, and Sunny is our baby sister. None of us is named Bambini."
"'Bambini' is the Italian word for 'children,'" Uncle Monty explained. "I had a sudden urge to speak a little Italian. I'm so excited to have you three here with me, you're lucky I'm not speaking gibberish. ~ Lemony Snicket