Whizzkids Summer Quotes

I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis. ~ Deborah Smith

Summer was over in twenty minutes that day. Finished. At four o'clock in the afternoon the roses were quiet on their stems, full-blown, fulfilled; the water in the pool was warm; the leaves on the trees quiet, too, and green. The cat lay with his belly to the sun, steeped in heat. ~ Elizabeth Enright

So very Russian," people around were murmuring. That they did meant this was an audience pretty low down on the scale of sophistication, otherwise they would be saying, "Just like us, isn't it? ~ Doris Lessing

It was an actual Christmas tree farm. We had, like, 15 acres. It was really fun as a kid. I also spent my summers at the Jersey Shore, on the bay in Stone Harbor. I walked everywhere barefoot. It was just the most amazing, magical way to grow up. ~ Taylor Swift

She rolled onto her back in the middle of the suddenly empty bed. Above her, the rafters glowed with the summer sun. Blue touched her mouth. It felt the same as it always did. Not at all like she had just gotten her first and last kiss. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Keeping track of your kids' clothing needs can be difficult. Annette compiles a list of needed clothes (dress, play, underwear, and outerwear) twice yearly - when she switches the kids' wardrobes from summer to winter ~ Steve Economides

As long as we're both alive and our hearts are still beating, there's still a chance. I won't go down without a fight, and I know you won't either. That gives us a chance. ~ Summer Lane

The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too. Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs. Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water. In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice).

Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water. At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water.

My father fell into this group, but my mother did not. She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time. After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life. ~ Jung Chang

I think everyone can recognize the one-upmanship and the competition that go on wherever you are, especially among groups where the women don't have to hold down office jobs and instead get in a total snit about who won the longest carrot contest or took first prize for summer chutney in the August fete. ~ Rachel Johnson

Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time. ~ Walker Percy

Now the summer's in prime Wi' the flowers richly blooming, And the wild mountain thyme A' the moorlands perfuming. To own dear native scenes Let us journey together, Where glad innocence reigns 'Mang the braes o' Balquhither. ~ Robert Tannahill

I have a house in the Connecticut countryside where you'll always find me, summer or winter. ~ Candace Bushnell

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

For me, it was almost like winter didn't count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers. ~ Jenny Han

I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande's garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread. And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn't come. T ~ Robin McKinley

It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were. ~ John Crowley

You know, we all have scars, Summer. If yours are only on the outside, you should consider yourself lucky. ~ Seth King

When I first started with you I thought it was only a matter of time before depression would take you over. And there was that one summer when it came close, but it didn't happen. Every day you get up and learn something new. Every day you find something to be happy about. Every single day you have a smile for me. ~ Nicola Yoon

The year was 1952." I clear my throat and look down at my paper. "It was summer, and Frank Sinatra was on the radio. Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were the starlets of the day. Stormy was eighteen. She was in the marching band, she was voted Best Legs, and she always had a date on Saturday night. On this particular night, she was on a date with a boy named Walt. On a dare, she went skinny-dipping in the town lake. Stormy never could turn down a dare."
Mr. Perelli laughs and says, "That's right, she never could." Other people murmur in agreement, "She never could."
"A farmer called the police, and when they shined their lights on the lake, Stormy told them to turn around before she would come out. She got a ride home in a police car that night."
"Not the first time or the last," someone calls out, and everyone laughs, and I can feel my shoulders start to relax.
"Stormy lived more life in one night than most people do their whole lives. She was a force of nature. She taught me that love--" My eyes well up and I start over. "Stormy taught me that love is about making brave choices every day. That's what Stormy did. She always picked love; she always picked adventure. To her they were one and the same. And now she's off on a new adventure, and we wish her well. ~ Jenny Han

What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent.
The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance.
But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment ...
What a soft thoughtful time.
In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color. ~ Vera Nazarian

From this vantage point in the summer, the countryside below is a dreaming checkerboard over which it seems that one could, with a running start, spread one's arms and fly. ~ Jenna Blum

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened. ~ Anthony Doerr

One year later, I grew out of my clothes because, it turns out, growing fourteen inches in a summer is easy. It's growing out of a label that's hard. Which ~ Jennifer Niven

And in the incendiary wake of Michael Brown's and Eric Garner's deaths at the hands of white police officers in the summer of 2014, a conventional production of Driving Miss Daisy that in no way subverts the text now seems nothing short of obscene. There ~ Jordan Tannahill

Tell me something about yourself." "I'd rather save the small talk." "There's no need to be rude, child, and believe me, I'm asking for a reason. Tell me something about yourself. Anything."
"I'm twenty-eight . . ."
He rejected that one out of hand. "Something personal. Something . . . interior. Tell me something you love."
I thought about it for a long few seconds, then said, "Ralph Lauren's summer line this year. Not the spring collection, which was way too pastel, and the winter was really crappy, all bland browns and grays. But he's got some good fabrics this summer, kind of a hot tangerine matched with dull red. Only he skirts, though. Hiscapri pants are for shit. Pockets? Who wants pockets on capri pants? What woman in her right mind puts extra fabric on her hips?"
There was a long and ringing silence. Patrick's eyes were wide and rather frightened.
He finally cleared
his throat and said, "Anything else apart from fashion?"
"What do you want me to say? Puppies? Fluffy kittens? Babies?"
"Let's try something simple. Your favorite food."
I rolled my eyes. "Chocolate." Duh . ~ Rachel Caine

One summer day I lay upon the grass. I'd sinned, no matter how, and in sin's wake there came a kind of drowsy peace so deep I hadn't even will enough to loathe myself. I had no mind to pray. I scarcely had a mind at all, just eyes to see the greenwood overhead, just flesh to feel the sun.
A light breeze blew from Wear that tossed the trees, and as I lay there watching them, they formed a face of shadows and of leaves. It was a man's green, leafy face. He gazed at me from high above. And as the branches nodded in the air, he opened up his mouth to speak. No sound came from his lips, but by their shape I knew it was my name.
His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow him to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior's face itself I saw. ~ Frederick Buechner

All the luck in the world has to come every year, in every part of every year, or there is not a harvest and then the luck, the bad luck will come and everything we are, all that we can ever be, all the Einsteins and babies and love and hate, all the joy and sadness and sex and wanting and liking and disliking, all the soft summer breezes on cheeks and first snowflakes, all the Van Goghs and Rembrandts and Mozarts and Mahlers and Thomas Jeffersons and Lincolns and Ghandis and Jesus Christs, all the Cleopatras and lovemaking and riches and achievements and progress, all of that, every single damn thing that we are or ever will be is dependent on six inches of topsoil and the fact that the rain comes when it's needed and does not come when it is not needed; everything, every ... single ... thing comes with that luck. ~ Gary Paulsen

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn't the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons- but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it. That summer, the one you'll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images ... flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that become our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion? ~ Jess Walter

She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple. ~ Edith Wharton

Sweetheart, when it comes to money, I'm always serious. When it comes to you, I'm fucking deadly. You can count on it. ~ Suzanne Steele

It's not where you're born
It's not where you belong
It's not how weak
But what will make you strong
- Summer Rain ~ U2

I wouldn't mind the early autumn if you came home today I'd tell you how much I miss you and know I'd be okay. It's funny how we never know exactly how our life will go It's funny how a dream can fade with the break of day. Time can't erase the memory and time can't bring you home Last Summer was a part of me and now a part is gone. - Margaret ~ Jacqueline Woodson

She coughs and speaks into her hand. "What was that?" Lowering her hand, she admits, "They had to pack up and drive to Pennsylvania. No more strong cock for this girl. It's heartbreaking, really. Fernando was amazing. I didn't understand a single word he said because my Portuguese is nonexistent, but who needs words when you've got an eleven-inch cock with the girth of jumbo summer sausage? My pussy may never be the same again . . . but at least I'll have the memories. ~ Meghan March

My way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end ~ Samuel Beckett

Mystique saturates, gluts the air,
Adventure's even more than rare,
Excitement's everywhere to share,
And Novelty's beyond compare. ~ Mariecor Ruediger

No, not of course at all - it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that 'of course'; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke - that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you're being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not 'straight ahead' but 'merry-go-round'! ~ Thomas Mann

During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames. ~ Michelle Malkin

At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats. ~ Alison Croggon

She smelled of lemons and honeysuckle, summer and laughter, intoxicating him with the fragrance of possibilities. ~ Melony Teague

I did not actually accuse you of being beautiful. I said you looked beautiful tonight. A subtle but significant difference."
"Yes, the gown," she started to say.
He stepped closer. "Is my eyesight failing? Let me take a closer study." He took another step, until she had to tilt back her head to look at him. "Hold still," he said, amusement softening his tone. He touched her chin.
Eliza froze.
Gently the earl tipped her face from side to side, his dark eyes intent upon her. "A few freckles," he said thoughtfully. "But I find those charming." His thumb brushed along her cheekbone and Eliza's hands fisted in the folds of her skirt. "Your lashes are very long," he murmured. "And your eyes... Your eyes are lovely. Like the fields of Rosemere under a summer sky, when the grasses are tall and verdant, and golden finches swoop in and out. ~ Caroline Linden

Our first kiss was soft, sweet. A question on my lips. He tasted like the watermelon bubble gum he was always chewing, and the stolen summer night. ~ Jessi Kirby

Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain. ~ W. Somerset Maugham