Monday, October 5, 2009

Grab-A-Line Monday


Here
is my offering this week:

...how fragile I feel....Like a piece of fine glass that has just been thumped, I'm vibrating, waiting for just the right frequency that will shatter me to pieces.

From BREATHE MY NAME
by R. A. Nelson


These are the offerings from last week's Grab-A-Line Monday:

Annie Louden shared this:
"He only loved his love for me and the pictures he was drawing. He loved those two. He loved the feeling he was having. I was a mere accessory to the feeling.

-Charles Baxter, THE FEAST OF LOVE

And Solving Sherrie, being the rock star that she is, offered a line from a song by Gin Blossoms.

"She had nothing left to say, so she said she loved me. And I stood there grateful for the lie."

Tanita remembered the colorful quotes from the week before and offered this saffron-colored line:
Deep down I'm not all that cynical, or hard or mean-- more soft-centered and especially vulnerable (or gullible, if you like) to first impressions; so I was a bit overwhelmed when I stepped into that Air India plane and was immediately transported to another planet. - Indian Summer, Pratima Mitchell

MG Higgins read Umbrella Summer after reading my review (I am glad you liked it!) and liked this line:

"I wished there was a way to keep that in a bottle, that one moment of wonderful perfect, so I could open it up whenever I needed to get a good whiff.

Shelley the story queen probably loves speaking this line to her young audience:
"Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done."

Eva Ibottson, ISLAND OF THE AUNTS

Nandini explained that this line needed context to be funny, which I didn't understand:
"Greetings, Ancient Uncle," he panted, "you have a very fast bullock."

YOUNGUNCLE COMES TO TOWN by Vandana Singh

What caught you this week?

12 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

I've been waiting to share this one all week:

I debated joining yearbook, too, but decided I didn't want to join a club whose sole purpose was to memorialize the awkwardness of our lives, and joined the Volunteer Society and the French Club instead."

-Sheba Karim, Skunk Girl

I was the high school yearbook "mascot" in 7th grade - essentially I was the "gofer" and was learning the ropes, but I after two years of actually never seeing my picture in the yearbook, I quit sophomore year.

...and started editing both campus papers. Fewer awkward missing pictures, anyway.

Yat-Yee said...

Thanks for having Grab A Line Monday on your mind this week.

Joining clubs: have you read my latest sub yet? Coincidence? Or great minds?

Mascot to editor: I'd say that was the right direction.

Mary Witzl said...

Hi Yat-Yee (and Tanita!)

Just picked up John Berendt's 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil', and the title is almost as good as the story. What's really weird is that it's supposed to be non-fiction.

Davin Malasarn said...

Okay, this doesn't exactly count because I don't have the actual words in front of me. But, this weekend, I met with my writers' group, and my friend Sue Coppa read a fantastic short story. It included this great simile about a woman who fell on the floor crying. (You had to be there!--but it was breathtaking!)

Yat-Yee said...

Hi Mary. Good to hear from you again. And yes, that is one cool title.

Davin: do you think you could convince your friend to share it? Tell her all my readers are civilized people who won't steal beautiful sentences. :) (Readers: don't make me a liar now.)

MG Higgins said...

I read Neal Shusterman's UNWIND last week and really loved it, but there weren't any lines that jumped out at me. DANI NOIR is next on my list. I have a feeling I'll have a good line next Monday.

Nandini said...

"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making," he began. ....... "As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses ... I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death--if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach"

One of the first pieces of dialogue from my favorite character of the Harry Potter series, who I believe needs no introduction to any of you :-)

Michelle D. Argyle said...

This is really a fun idea! I'm enjoying it so far. :)



"What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Ch. 2

Yat-Yee said...

MG: Thanks for checking in even though you don't have a line. Waiting for your next one. Who knows, it may come from a totally unexpected source.

Nandini: who would have thought passion paired with condescension can be so delicious.

Michelle: I just bought crime and punishment. I've been wanting to for so long.

Michelle D. Argyle said...

You will love it if you haven't read it. It explores the human mind more deeply than almost any book I've read.

Annie Louden said...

I have two sentences, but I like them:

Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Jeannie Campbell, LMFT said...

a steamroller caught me and rolled right over me. yikes! blog drama....read below. :)

I wanted to let you know about my blog address change. *sigh* If you're following me, my posts now won't show up in your feed, dashboard, sidebar, whatever. So please forgive me, but you'll have to change the address for my main writing blog, Where Romance Meets Therapy, to http://jeanniecampbell.blogspot.com. To do this, you have to "unfollow" me and follow me again. Sorry for the confusion!

Jeannie
The Character Therapist