#ak

I try to gauge whether a girl likes me before I make a move. I would write a page-long note to a girl.If she wrote a whole page back, I knew she liked me, too. If she wrote back like two words, then I figured I'd move on. ↗

— Devon Werkheiser

#before #figured #gauge #girl #i

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag? ↗

— Annie Dillard

#awakening #college #poetry #home

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me. ↗

— Samuel West

#always #been #book #bores #collected

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk. ↗

— Edward Weston

#composition #consulting #going #gravity #laws

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend. ↗

— Byron White

#amendment #protects #right #speak #spend

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month's hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker's dozen. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#history #trivia #home

It's a cruel, heartless world out there in commercial rock 'n' roll, and when you take as much time off as we did, eight years, booking agents don't know if you'll draw. ↗

— Tina Weymouth

#booking #commercial #cruel #did #draw

As easy might I from myself depart As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie. That is my home of love. -Shakespeare, Sonnet 109 ↗

— Shakespeare

#shakespeare #home

I am honored to be able to serve GM at this critical juncture and take part in its reinvention. ↗

— Edward Whitacre, Jr.

#am #critical #gm #honored #i

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#mozart #opera #shakespeare #verdi #wagner