three months QUOTES

1 " I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.) "

― John Green , The Fault in Our Stars

3 " One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling.

Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home.

Silver and blue, blue and silver.

Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears.

The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be.

Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.

“Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass.

The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon.

Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater.

“It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”

Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it?

The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass.

Why doesn’t the wind move the light?

Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand.

“Stop,” he calls.

“Halt,” he calls.

But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth. "

― Anthony Doerr , All the Light We Cannot See

5 " Love is when you have not been home for three months and call up home and your daughter picks up the phone and says " Papa, I love you! "

7 " Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder? "

― Alain de Botton , The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

9 " That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop. "

― Kathryn Stockett , The Help

11 " Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar... "

― Stacy Pershall , Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

13 " Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?'

'I expect my luck will decide that question for me.'

'Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?'

'I'd call it lucky to choose,' said Moody—surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior. "

― Eleanor Catton , The Luminaries

15 " They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. "

― Douglas Adams , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)

17 " The three months I'd spend with Eddie had taught me many things, and the top two items were (1) A Cat's Purr Makes Everything Okay and (2) The Cat Always Wins. "

19 " Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’
‘Why did she do that?’
Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story. "

― Evelyn Waugh , Brideshead Revisited