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41 " My own tears seemed landlocked and frozen in a glacier I could not reach or touch within me. "
― Pat Conroy , Beach Music
42 " It took Lucy forty hours to die and we hardly left her side. . . .We spent those last hours kissing her frequently and telling her how deeply we loved her. Then I began to read Leah’s children’s books out loud to her. She had lived a storyless childhood, so I read in the last day of her life the books she had missed. I told her about Winnie the Pooh and Yertle the Turtle, took her Where the Wild Things Are, introduced her to Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. Each of us took turns reading to her out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and, at the very last, Leah insisted that I tell all the Great Dog Chippie stories I had told her during our year of exile from the family in Rome. "
43 " The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing. "
44 " We surf-fished in the breakers catching spottail bass and flounder for dinner. I discovered that summer that I loved to cook and feed my friends, and I enjoyed the sound of their praise as they purred with pleasure at the meals I fixed over glowing iron and fire. I had the run of my grandparents’ garden and I would put ears of sweet corn in aluminum foil after washing them in seawater and slathering them with butter and salt and pepper. Beneath the stars we would eat the beefsteak tomatoes okra and the field peas flavored with salt pork and jalapeno peppers. I would walk through the disciplined rows that brimmed with purple eggplants and watermelons and cucumbers, gathering vegetables. My grandfather, Silas, told us that summer that low country earth was so fertile you could drop a dime into it and grow a money tree. "
45 " A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted. “Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. "
46 " . . . beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky . . . "
47 " She had camouflaged the vinegar factory in her character with a great honeycomb along the sills and porches of her public self. "
48 " . . . the hardships and perils that eat around the edges of even the strongest loves. "
49 " The two fountains spoke to each other in the pretty speech of falling water . . . . "
50 " I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused. "
51 " It seemed to me that their love was based on their common need for order and mannerliness in their lives. Both had endured lives of chaos and incivility in their first marriages, and they provided each other with safe harbor at last. The town of Waterford had "
52 " By carefully editing what I thought would harm her, I turned my childhood into something as glamorous as forbidden fruit. "
53 " In twenty feet of water, . . . the four of us watched the moonlight play on the surface of the water. It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. "
54 " When you have been hurt you lose your trust in the world. If the world’s mean to you when you’re a child, you spend the rest of your life being mean back. "
55 " The scampi tasted sweet like a lobster fed only on honey and it cut into the deep undertone of flavor deposited on the taste buds by the truffles. "
56 " šeima - pernelyg drausminga armija, kad užjaustų dezertyrus. "
57 " On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool. "
58 " čia ir pamilau tas knygas ir autorius taip, kaip moka ir supranta tik ilgamečiai skaitytojai. Geras filmas nė sykio manęs nepalietė ir nepakeitė taip, kaip gera knyga. Knygos gebėdavo amžiams keisti mano požiūrį į pasaulį. Geras filmas mano pasaulio suvokimą pakeisdavo dienai. "
59 " Upstaged by a schizophrenic, Dallas said. The story of my life. "
60 " music as we danced our way in both "