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"I love the smell of old books, Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs."
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"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"Books. It's always easier to tell people that a character is funny rather than attempt to hit the punchline of a joke that character would've said. But if we all simply told, books would cease to exist. And so would empathy. And feeling."
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca McNutt
"Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I'm not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that's been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that's what growing up is, it's a fading photograph."
"When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?"
"I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly; they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them; if I were you I would stop smoking them."Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes, Mandy pointed out."Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties, for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes, but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you, Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea."
"Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. "This is a wicked blast, Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes."
"Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone, her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. "Where've you been, what've you been up to?"Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend? Mandy asked."No, what in the name of god are you on about? her mom sighed in exasperation."Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen? Mandy insisted."No, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all, said her mom all too quickly."
"I'll never buy a cell phone, I'd rather die than have a cell phones. Cell phones are the 21st century's ball and chain."
“Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after—you know—after the funeral. We haven't had the money for any of your weird little games, and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone,” her father had added disappointedly.
“How much'd that cake cost you?”
“It's paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year, and I—it was my birthday, Dad!”
“You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.
Mandy hadn't cried; she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “I'm normal.”
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