needle (beth)

The record’s already on the turntable, and I place the needle carefully on Pretty in Pink, I figure the title of that song is innocuous and makes the band seem most appropriate for someone my age.

from We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

memory (beth)

Jason once tried to sketch memory as if it were a real thing. He had drawn memory as a blanket, a thin fabric of once-upon-a-times and don’t-ever-forgets covering something bright and glowing—a soul, maybe—with rips where kids forgot things like the rumble of a person’s voice when your head rests on their chest or the smell of them when their arm is wrapped around you. ~from The Reckless Club by Beth Vrabel

mountain (beth)

“Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you’re all to yourself that way, you’re really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. ~from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine

bible (beth)

‘Only—if you care for a thing long enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t that the whole point of things—-beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?’ ~from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

cheese (beth)

Back in Cambridge she stopped at Formaggio, the fancy neighborhood shop for cheeses—cheeses and crackers and several kinds of olives. They had cherry tomatoes that looked nice in the produce section, so she got those too, and a few other things for a light dinner tonight.

Standing in line to check out, she was mindlessly looking over at the flowers displayed in the corner of the shop. There were tulips, lilacs, peonies, irises. Gorgeous she thought. Hopeful, as spring flowers always are. She’d get some. For the party, of course.  p 69-70 from Sue Miller’s forthcoming book, Monogamy

window (beth)

“You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small.” from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

bed (beth)

More than pleasure, she felt relief, a relief so vast it seemed to alter the color of things in her path: the begonias halfway up Montgomery Place turned a hot, saturated pink; a cup of coffee swimming with cream was almost perverse in its beauty. It was the no longer trying so hard that drove her in those early days to near ecstasy.          p 102 from The Book of V by Anna Solomon

health (beth)

The world was beautiful. It surprised me, how beautiful it kept on insisting on being. In spite of all the lies, it was beautiful. from Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo

Feet (beth)

“Good,” she said, and started once again to hop from one foot to the glorious other.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Pretending I”m walking on glass.”

“Is it fun?”

“Try it if you like.”

“Okay,” I said, and I did. And it strangely was.

from When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

command (beth)

In the past few months, for the first time in his four years of graduate school, he had begun to feel that he might be at the edge of something. He had gotten to the perimeter of an idea, could feel the bounds of its questions, the depth and width of its concerns. He had been waking with the steadily resolving form of an idea in his mind, and this idea had been pulling him through the unremarkable hours, through the grit and the dull ache when he woke at nine to return to work after going to sleep at five. The thing that had been spinning in the brilliant light of the tall lab windows, like a speck or a dust mote, had been hope, had been the prospect of a moment of brief clarity. ~from Real Life by Brandon Taylor