#pare

An office boy in London was the lowest of the low. The office boy was the tea boy. He would be the dog's body: It means someone who would do anything at all. I was quite prepared for that and enjoyed it. ↗

— George Carey

#body #boy #dog #enjoyed #i

They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon. It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine] It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#imagination #love #make-believe #parenting #dreams

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship! ↗

— Edward Carpenter

#board #destined #did #father #german

When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time. ↗

— Tom Felton

#doing #i #old #reading #seen

We were totally unprepared for such a large quantity of visitors, and in view of the preservation of the antiquities they being very crowded and in poor preservation, we were obliged to refuse admission until some preparation was made to safeguard the objects. ↗

— Howard Carter

#being #crowded #large #made #objects

As I got older, I never considered that tons of people were watching me on television every week. I give a nod to my parents for keeping me as normal as I could be in an un-normal adult world. ↗

— Angela Cartwright

#considered #could #every #give #got

In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948. ↗

— Rene Cassin

#articles #assembly #december #discussion #draft

I'd just play 'til my hands fell off. My parents would yell at me to stop because they couldn't stand the noise any more! I was terrible! It must have been hard for them to listen to me as a beginning drummer. ↗

— Randy Castillo

#because #been #beginning #drummer #fell

My grandparents got married at a very young age, and a lot of what I think about marriage is based on their relationship. I watched them over the years and saw how they dealt with everything together, as a team. ↗

— Kyle Chandler

#age #based #dealt #everything #got

If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else. ↗

— Jung Chang

#become #brought #chairman #chairman mao #children