The Idle Years

The end result was bound to be negative... I realised that waving my fists at a cliff would be a pointless gesture.

Don't let other people get a word in! You've got to talk non-stop...use all the words in your vocabulary...they might not understand everything you've said, but, believe me, they remember who you are after that!
The thing is, 80% of people don't think about what's being said, but they remember who spoke, and how things were expressed.

by Orhan Kemal

My Sister's Keeper

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

[Children] outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

Here’s my question: What age are you when you’re in Heaven? I mean, if it’s Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up in a mine?

I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you’d like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I’m a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven I’d be young and pretty.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

I realise.. that we never have children, we receive them.

by Jodi Picoult

The Ballad of the Bathroom

One of you,

I know not whom,

Turns the bathroom,

Into a (toilet) paperless desert.

One of you,

I know not whom,

Turns the carpet,

Into a soggy swamp.

One of you,

I know not whom,

Turns the sink,

Into a hair filled orang-utan.

One of you,

I know not whom,

Turns the waste-basket,

Into an overflowing cup.