Xochitl Giardina > Xochitl's Quotes

“Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Crickey, love, what happened here? Are you hurt?” he asked, lifting her to her feet, the surfboard leash still wrapped around her foot.

Her eyes worked their way up his torso, along the plush green towel hugging his midsection. Catherine couldn’t help staring at his well-formed abs and chest before making her way up to his concerned eyes.

“Obviously I fell,” Catherine said. “I think I got a splinter.”

“Let me see,” Jake insisted, taking her hand into his. “It’s small. I can take care of that in a snap.”

Staring up into his deep blue eyes, Catherine could feel herself drowning in the depths of them, unconsciously resting her other hand upon his dampened chest to steady herself.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“911. What is your emergency?”
“Dead body.”
“You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“There’s a dead body in the woods!”
“Where are you located?”
“I’m on one of the trails off Summit Road in Wild Oaks Mountain Park. I’m near the summit.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“No, I can’t! Just get someone here!”
― Behcet Kaya, Body In The Woods

“Listen to your kuya, sister. Got three type kilikili.” He raises his finger. “One, that kano armpit smell like butter, burger, dollar; two, that Chinese intsik one smell like noodles, siopao, yuan; three, that bumbay one bad smell like roti, curry, rupee. Next time, find a kano who smells like butter, burger, or dollar. Curry not good. Rupee also not good, ba.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“She peeped through one of the small holes in the outer wall rising up from the walkway. The world on the outside was nothing but countryside now. Dirt roads, like chocolate ribbons, disappeared into woods or green fields in the distance.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Tightening his embrace around his wife and little Theo, he vowed, "I will do everything in my power to continue being worthy of the faith you have in me.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment. 
The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become.
As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper. 
She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale.
Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?”
I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.
 “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”
            I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”
 I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank.
“Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”
  I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”
  So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Interviewer ...In the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain--or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing -- flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc. -- is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.”
― David Foster Wallace

“In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“the tundra was even more beautiful—a glistening gold, and its shadows were purple and blue. Lemon-yellow clouds sailed a green sky and every wind-tossed sedge was a silver thread. “Oh,” she whispered in awe, and stopped where she was to view the painted earth.”
― Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves

“What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“That's why when major badasses greet each other in movies, they don't say anything, they just nod. The nod means, 'I' am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass,' but they don't say anything because they're Wolverine and Magneto and it would mess up their vibe to explain.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

“Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. Is that your logic?”
― R. Gerry Fabian, Just Out Of Reach

“We think that the word 'boy' or the the word 'girl' says something about who a person is, who they will be. But that difference is much less dictated by the body they're born in than created by what we expect of them and how we treat each other.”
― Sara Pascoe

“Her growing possessiveness felt both good and bad.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“She gasped. In his eyes, in just a heartbeat or two, she saw herself for what she was: a creature of this broken world, herself bearing the burden of the breaking.”
― Jack Borden, The Lost City: An Epic YA Fantasy Novel

“What is real for us is what we observe and recognize. We create our own experiences by our recognition and imagination, and we modulate the energies with our emotions.”
― Kenneth Schmitt, Quantum Energetics and Spirituality Volume 1: Aligning with Universal Consciousness

“If you could travel back in time, you would miss out on all of the mistakes you made. You would undoubtedly be someone very different. Long live my past and my mistakes.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“The sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.”
― Walter Isaacson

“I’m sure you've heard the adage "thoughts are things" or perhaps "believe and you will achieve". There are variations on these principles, but they drill down to the same basic concept; it's a mindset and it works.”
― C. Toni Graham

“Mama never told me I had a father.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights