Lou Ann Hid A Smile With Her Hand.What?Nothing. I Could See Perfectly Well She Was Still Smiling.'Come

Lou Ann hid a smile with her hand. ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’ I could see perfectly well she was still smiling. 'Come on, what is it?’ 'It’s been so long,’ she said. 'You talk just like me.’

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (via frazzlem0nster)

They are pirates, madam, and Frenchman at that.

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier  (via wholesomeobsessive)

so donna tartt really did just invent comedy huh

“I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.” “You live in that world,” he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn’t want to.

The Bean Trees (via persephones-fruit)

Consider the snow globe...

“Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful… Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyor belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS driver carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.”

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven, 2014

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees (via awellreadwoman)