Fractured Retelling Quotes

He raised his wine for a toast. "To the Exquisite Nightmare. ~ A.G. Howard

Jostling in the saddle against an iron shirt of mail wasn't half as romantic as the books made it out to be. ~ Amy Jarecki

She ... grabbed her bra, clasping it and shoving her arms through.
"Ye harness your udders?" The man was insufferable.
"For your information, it's a bra - short for brassiere, something that wasn't invented until the twentieth century. ~ Amy Jarecki

He appears close to my age. The left half of his face stands out beneath the hood: one side of plump lips, one squared angle of a chin. Two coppery-colored eyes look back at me – bright and metallic. The sight makes me do a double take. As far as he is from the car, I shouldn't be able to make out the color, yet they glimmer in the shadow of his cape, like pennies catching a flashlight's glare in a deep well. ~ A.G. Howard

Ever since I was small, opera has been a living, breathing part of me.
The problem is that as I've grown, it's become more demanding… an entity that controls me. Once a song speaks to my subconscious, the notes become a toxin I have to release through my diaphragm, my vocal cords, my tongue. ~ A.G. Howard

Barely able to breathe, Eva's tongue slipped across her lips.
He moved a bit closer. "Every time ye walk past, I want ye. Your scent sends my insides into a maelstrom of need."
She closed her eyes and drew out the moment, wishing he'd say that again. Oh, how delectable to listen to a medieval Scotsman declare his desire. ~ Amy Jarecki

Guard your throats and hide your eyes. He's not dead, you fools. Legends never die. ~ A.G. Howard

Unbridled passion with an incredibly hot seven hundred-year-old Highlander in the middle of the night? Mm Yeah. Bring it on. ~ Amy Jarecki

I need to know why I'm so broken, so I can fix myself. One way or another. Maybe this place can help me do that, and then I can finally look forward to my future. Because I'm starting to realize there's something worse than stepping up and facing your fears – and that's living as if you're already dead. ~ A.G. Howard

Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door. They contended that even if he didn't want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running. They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party - divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates - fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney - the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman - for salvation. Your party might still need you, Mitt's loyalists insisted. The country might still need you! ~ McKay Coppins

On a Friday night in 1983, I was in a taxi in New York riding home from dinner with friends. A drunk driver ran a red light and hit the cab, and I was thrown toward the glass partition. I tried to duck, but my face hit the glass, and the impact fractured my cheekbone, my eye socket, my collarbone and several ribs. ~ Iman

Someone told me I'd find a princess of great worth here. One with the strength to be the hero this realm needs."
He stared at me with those unsettling blue eyes. They were cold, like ice water - made me shiver from head to toe. Then his gaze seemed to search even deeper. Finally, he looked through me, like I was nothing. In brisk steps, he strode across the marble to the courtyard. But before crossing the threshold, he turned back to glare at me with his lip curled ever so slightly. "It seems she was mistaken."...
I felt my own lip curl in response. How rude! Who the Grimm was this peasant to judge me? I was wearing a Glenda original. Original! Not some fairy-godmother knockoff worn by those servant girls turned royal. I was a crown princess, for the love of fairy, and no one dismissed me. ~ Betsy Schow

We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness. ~ Anish Kapoor

But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. ~ Doris Lessing

But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment. ~ Henry Giroux

Myths arise from actual events, remarkable events that get talked about precisely because they are remarkable and which then get embellished in the retelling. ~ Matthew Reilly

I wept as I understood. Kill me now, she was saying. Do it fast. Don't make it hurt. Kill me now.
I couldn't do it.
But she held my gaze-held my gaze and nodded.
As I lifted the ash dagger, something inside me fractured so completely that there would be no hope of ever repairing it. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many times I might try to paint her face. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Kon's films present a fractured, multifaceted world in which everyone has their own different reality. ~ Andrew Osmond

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 ~ Anatole Broyard

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives. ~ Ben Okri

His steady gaze was even softer than his voice. It reached out to the broken parts of her like a caress. The type of touch that moves through damaged flesh, past fractured bones and into a person's wounded soul. ~ Stephanie Garber

It didn't take long for her to help him remove his armor.
She gestured to the pallet. "Lie down."
"Not yet." He pulled her into his arms and held her against his chest. This is what he was fighting for. Not just for himself, but for all men to hold their women in their arms - and to raise families free from tyranny. ~ Amy Jarecki

You're the Baba Yaga?" He gazed at her in disbelief. "But the Baba Yaga is an ugly old crone, and you're, you're... not! ~ Deborah Blake

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. ~ Elie Wiesel

For the last few centuries, these jeweled fruits have been my constant and sole companions. The greatest treasure in all the world, as comfortless as light to the blind. ~ Jessica Khoury

Alice: I didn't know that cheshire cats grinned. In fact, I didn't know that cats could grin.
Duchess: They can, and most of 'em do. ~ Rod Espinosa

My future was about to happen. ~ Emma Donoghue

Even though my fear was detonating over and over like bombs dropping, the fragile and fractured wings of my heart dared to beat as well, and alongside all that fear and all that gratitude, I felt the first precious rush of hope. ~ Shauna Niequist

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Astonishment: these women's military professions - medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper - and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles - here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history "humanizes" itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I've happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from the ground. Before her is the whole path - up and down - from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they "write" their life. Sometimes they also "write up" or "rewrite." Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people - nurses, cooks, laundresses - behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read - not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, ~ Svetlana Alexievich

She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

First, I spit out a mouthful of dirt. Then, I screamed at the sky. "That's it! I've had it! Everything is trying to kill me! All I did was make one stupid wish. Aladdin made three. I'm the hero of this story, so where's my happy ending, already? It's not fair."

Rexi bent over, trying to catch her breath. "You know what's not fair? Spending Muse Day as a toad just because the kitchen ran out of frog legs. Or being volunteered for this little journey. So build a bridge, then make like a billy goat and get over it already because no one is listening. ~ Betsy Schow

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. ~ Amy Tan

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ~ Jonathan Franzen

There is a pale, penetrating loneliness chiselled into every statue. A kind of loneliness made living. It haunts every rock and stone, every sinew of every room. A whispering, blistery loneliness. In a breath's moment, I swear I can hear voices, and at the exact same time, all I can hear is the deafening sound of utter nothingness. ~ Kate Macdonald

Hmm," she said. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' to quote Alice. ~ Deborah Blake

I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together. ~ Stephen Malkmus

You think this is a corsage? How adorably human of you. ~ A.G. Howard

But now they must've worn off. He thought he may have groaned. It was hard to be sure in his kinda awake state. He tried to move his hand and yelled out at the pain. Oh yeah, fractured wrist. "Easy there, bad boy." Oh my lord. Curtis would know that sexy whisky-dripped baritone anywhere. He'd force open his own eyes now just to see those green eyes looking down at him. He didn't care if his head exploded into a million pieces. It'd be worth it for this sight. "Open those beautiful baby blues," Genesis said in a hushed drawl. Curtis fought through the fog and the pain and cracked open his eyes. He blinked a few times at the harsh light above his head but he kept on until Genesis' gorgeous face was in focus. Curtis' lips parted in a smile. What on earth was he doing there? He believed it was a Monday now. Genesis should be in school. "Gen. ~ A.E. Via

Quite the narration in your head, even for a moment, and see for yourself that life is life, and not one minute of it is a retelling or a foretelling. Some things happen; some things don't. That's what makes it all worth seeing, no matter where it goes or how it ends. There is no spinmeister steering it all to a forgone conclusion. ~ Karen Maezen Miller