Home > Topic > a centimeter
1 " Give a man a centimeter and he'll think he's a ruler. "
― Janet Skeslien Charles , Moonlight in Odessa
2 " Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. "
― Anna Funder , Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
3 " I mean: if you’re going outside to look for your sister, I get it.” Max goes silent. Maybe Mirjam’s death is hitting him now, maybe his voice will choke—but he goes on. “But if you’re going outside to help your mother . . .” He gestures helplessly at my injured arm. His fingers stop a centimeter away, hovering in midair. “Don’t risk it. Don’t risk you.”“She’s my mother.”“The captain will never let her on if she doesn’t even try. Not when there are so many people who haven’t had thechance to try. People we can use on the ship. People who have been on that waiting list forever.”There are a dozen things I want to say. But she’s mymother—as though that means as much as people pretend it does.She is trying, just in a different way—as though I’m convincing myself.I wasn’t on that waiting list, either.I might not be someone the ship can use, as much as I’m trying to be. "
― Corinne Duyvis , On the Edge of Gone
4 " We’re just…,” those blue eyes blaze at me and steal my breath, drawing me in, “just different people on different paths.”He comes closer, until he’s standing a centimeter away from me. “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want me,” he dares.“Jesus. Are you really that confident?”“I’m really that interested. "
― , A Diamond in the Rough (Diamond in the Rough series book 1)
