Spot the Orange Penguin? Charl08 (Charlotte) reads in 2016 #6

His grandmother told him gallant tales if heroism and cunning and wit and honour; of Arjana the great archer; of King Harishchandra, whose honesty shook even the heavens; of Bisham of the terrible oath; and of Bhageerathi, who persuaded wild and whimsical Ganga to flow down as a river and wash over the ashes of his thousand brothers....While the young Sripathi adored his grandmother's stories, richly trimmed with Sanskrit versesfrom the Mahabharata or the Ramadan, a dread grew within him that he would never be able to do the things she expected of him.

All down the beach, from the town of Zihuatanejo, was a faint dazzle and dance of tiny green light. Fireflies, neon lime-green. Village girls placed them in their hair when they walked at dusk, strolling in groups of twos or threes. Some of the girls scattered the insects through their hair, others arranged them into emerald tiaras.

...excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind... While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature...

For a Happy Easter, eat ya a couple a Peeps! You know you want to… Made right here in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Weird, huh?

If I belonged anywhere, it was, vaguely,among the uprooted bohemian types eking out a living in jobs similar to mine, a kind of protracted adolescence possible only in a city where no one knows you and you don't care about anyone's judgement. They were as likely to be English as Japanese or Armenian, but they obsessed about their espressos more than about their nationality. They shared ramshackle houses in places like Walthamstow or Peckham, where the main streets were lined with African markets, fried chicken vendors and laptop repair shops, but, unlike here in Chelski, the realm of extreme wealth, they frequented cafes where people sat and talked without looking around for better or more important company...

...allows the reader to be a voyeur with him, to eavesdrop with him, to rifle desk drawers, to take what don't belong to him.The feeling is not entirely pleasurable.

There was something about talking with him that made me feel better, no matter the conversation. My mother used to say my father and I thought in the same circles. I never understood it until I watched us later, in memories - when we were gazing at the sky (and we often were) we could unconsciously turn in the same direction and extract the same face from the crowds.

I left the house for the first time when the chickens exploded.... As the bombs fell they released showers of tiny metal balls. The outside world called them "cluster bombs." We called them zvončići , jingle bells. They were not like traditional land mines or trip wires constructed to kill in combat zones. Zvončići clung to tree branches and roof tiles, nestledin patches of grass; they fell indiscriminately, like combustible hail. They were patient, making up for what they lacked in size with the element of surprise. They had surprised the chickens.

He was sick of the excuses and the lies. He was tired of the evasions and the untruths, of people refusing to stand up and speak the truth and take responsibility for their own actions. It seemed to him like another symptom of the decline of western civilisation; of chaos; of climate change; and environmental disaster; and war; disease; famine; oppression; the eternal slow slide down and down and down. It was entropy, nemesis, apotheosis, imminent apocalypse and sheer bad manners all rolled into one.
People were not returning their library books on time.

Freud's work is best read as a long elegy for the intelligibility of our lives. We make sense of our lives in order to be free, not to have to make sense.

Her daughter was trying to rehabilitate her lowbrow taste in reading material with what Queenie called "serious" books- literary novels, prize-winners, Oprah's picks. Sandra sent them down from Edmonton with encouraging notes scribbled inside the covers. Queenie never cracked a spine, but for the few written by Newfoundlanders or about Newfoundland. She took those on as a kind of patriotic duty, though it was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing, she said. Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story. Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognised and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they were written by townies, she liked to say.

Despite the storm, the night was warm, and the front windows of the big brasserie on Boulevard de Clichy were wide open. The two men were sitting where the terrace met the bar. On one side a hot, brightly lit bustle, the comings and goings of waiters, the lively groups of diners; on the other, tables deserted under the awning, which bulged with water; two young women with empty glasses in front of them; the rain, which was still falling, but not with the same intensity as earlier. Place Blanche with its electric signs, beyond a patch of darkness where taxis skidded on the wet asphalt, and the glowing reflection of the sails of the Moulin Rouge, which turned tirelessly …

When I go out there I sort of cross my eyes, and when I call the patient’s name I smile at the mother or grandmother or foster care mom but I look at a third eye in their forehead. I learned this in Emergency. It’s the only way to work here, especially with all the crack babies and AIDS and cancer babies. Or the ones who will never grow up. If you look the parent in the eyes you will share it, confirm it, all the fear and exhaustion and pain. On the other hand once you get to know them, sometimes that’s all you can do, look into their eyes with the hope or sorrow you can’t express.

The avenue is lined with trees and that last morning it was foggy like an old Chinese painting. Just the sound of the tires and the wipers. Our leg chains made the sound of oriental instruments and the prisoners in orange jumpsuits swayed together like Tibetan monks. You laugh. Well, so did I.

If you don't believe in your reading then don't bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don't care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not.

...hearing Bikini Kill was like having someone illuminate my world for the first time. Here was a narrative that I could place myself inside. ...I could turn the volume up on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions.... It's hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept.