The Future for Curious People - Pg 13

   Why isn't Madge looking for me? Is anyone thinking about me right now? If not, do I exist just a little less?

The Future for Curious People - Pg 13

   She tilted her head and sighed at me as if seeing a current failure of some kind but one with promise. And, in that moment, my pencil mid-clitoris, I don't know if I fell in love with her, but I know I wanted her to take me on. I wanted to fulfill that promise. I loved the tilt of her head and her sigh and the fact that she called me on my bullshit. I needed Madge and that was the start of love. I think that's how it sometimes goes.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 6

   "I'll miss you, Adrian."
   He touches my face gently with his fingertips and says, "You can't fire me. I quit." But he says it in the saddest voice possible and I love him with a flash that's deep and unmistakable. Each person you love leaves his or her own stain, and the way you remember him is like a smell, a taste, a color--indescribable but distinct.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 5

   I'll miss his hands on me and the way he says I'm the best goddamn librarian in the world, even though he's never understood what I do at the library exactly. There's something sweet about how he loves me without knowing me--a blind love, which is almost like an unconditional love but not quite.

FACES IN THE WATER - JANET FRAME

Faces in the Water - Pg 250

   I have never met a man who knew so many secrets; but although he behaved as if he had opened all the lucky packets of life he never disclosed what he really found in them and one suspects that it was only trinkets that broke when he touched them.

Faces in the Water - Pg 247

   Who are we, have we changed when we no longer claim as our treasure the stalk of grass in our hand or the chocolate paper but choose the human beings that we hope to hold tight in our heart? Are we sane then? Have we progressed from illness when we do not care any more for the pink cretonne bag with its pattern of roses, but begin to look for people that we may thread a drawstring round their neck and carry them back and forth inside ourselves, and not be willing to let them go not even in the night in sleep and dreams?

Faces in the Water - Pg 244

   Looking through the window I felt depressed and hopeless at the sameness of everything. Living is so much like one of those childhood games where you keep shutting your eyes and on opening them expect to find everything changed--anew city with glass towers, a table laden for a feast, a kindly forest where the trees no longer strike blows or twist themselves into fearful shapes.

Faces in the Water - Pg 241

   He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called "normal" people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.

Faces in the Water - Pg 239

   The fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the micelike letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Time and again, with Doris and other dwarves and patients who resembled witches or seemed inhabited by dragons, one felt like a witness to the origins of folklore; one felt that such people, whose only home in the world was a mental hospital, would have their problem solved if they could indeed dwell in the cups of flowers or behind people's eyes, or in cottages deep in the wood with poisonous thorns in the garden and a one-eyed cat waiting at the front door.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Her sewing was the neatest I have seen, like that of the legendary small people who climb at night into the flowers and embroider the petals or sit on stalks of grass knitting dewdrops, or the evil folk who creep in people's eyes and draw the curtains and furtively stitch tapestries with poisoned needle and thread or have their workroom in people's ears, tatting back and forth with their shuttle full of decibels.

Faces in the Water - Pg 226

   The brilliant whiteness increased until it could no longer bear its own intensity, when it changed suddenly to deadly black velvet, like love which overstrains itself into hate, or like the dark side of our nature which we meet most suddenly when we believe ourselves to be journeying farthest from it.

Faces in the Water - Pg 222

   They talked of the future as if it were something tangible and within reach, like a ripe pear hanging over the fence from a neighbor's garden, whereas I had known for so long now that the future had been attacked by worms that had crept into it and eaten its heart. Faith might be a good neighbor and hang fruit over the fence but something else was needed to wield the arsenic spray.

Faces in the Water - Pg 204

   I smelled the room, I went shopping among the smells--old urine mixed with misery for it was not the honest stench of babies not yet trained but a preserved and outcast adult smell of those who had known and been deprived of their knowing; the smell of stale polish, straw and straw dust, sunlessness; the smell of corners, of the wooden door that had been kicked and hammered upon for seventy years.