She has this sort of red hair, a little bit like Allie’s was, that’s very short in the summertime. In the summertime, she sticks it behind her ears. She has nice, pretty little ears. In the wintertime, it’s pretty long, though. Sometimes my mother braids it and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s really nice, though. She’s only ten. She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her. I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about. I mean you can even take her anywhere with you. If you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it’s a lousy movie. If you take her to a pretty good movie, she knows it’s a pretty good movie. D.B. and I took her to see this French movie, The Baker’s Wife, with Raimu in it. It killed her. Her favorite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddamn movie by heart, because I’ve taken her to see it about ten times.
{Phoebe Caulfield}
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is!
(Ordinary women}
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
She laughed nervously as she spoke and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put out in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.
{Lady Henry}
The PIcture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
“I mean he’s this awful little person from Altoona, Pensilvania — or one of those places. Apparently starving to death. I’m kind and decent enough — I’m the original Good Samaritan — to take him into my apartment, this absolutely microscopic little apartment that I can hardly move around in myself. Introduce him to all my friends. Let him clutter up the whole apartment with his horrible manuscript papers, and cigarette butts, and radishes, and whatnot. Introduce him to every theatrical producer in New York. Haul his filthy shirts back and forth from the laundry. And on top of it all —“ The young man broke off. “And the result of all my kindness and decency,” he went on, “is that he walks out of the house at five or six in the morning — without so much as leaving a note behind — taking with him anything and everything he can lay his filthy, dirty hands on.”
{The writer who lived with Eric}
Just Before the War with the Eskimos, by J.D. Salinger
He took a cigarette from his own pack, ignoring a transparent humidor on the table, and lit it with his own lighter. His hands were large. They looked neither strong nor competent nor sensitive. Yet he used them as if they had some not easily controllable aesthetic drive of their own.
{Eric’s hands}
Just Before the War with the Eskimos, by J.D. Salinger
And deep down, I don’t think Norah wants to run, either. She just feels like she has to. Partly because she’s a tiresome spoiled-brat smartass with no fashion sense. And partly because she’s a fucking human being.
{Norah Silverberg}
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I’m better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave when it’s time to go.
{The narrator}
The Lover’s Dictionary, by David Levithan
The harder I tried not to think about her, the more impossible it became to explain, I went back to her house, I walked through the road between our two neighborhoods with my head down, she wasn’t there again. I wanted to call her name, but I didn’t want her to hear my voice, all of my desire was based on that one brief exchange, held in the palm of our half hour together were one hundred million arguments, and impossible admissions, and silences. I had so much to ask her.
{The moments after meeting Anna}
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
There was one pleasant thing about my ratty attic: the back window of it overlooked a little private park, a little Eden formed by joined back yards. That park, that Eden, was walled off from the streets by houses on all sides.
It was big enough for children to play hide-and-seek in.
I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child’s cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, that those still hiding were to come out of hiding, that it was time to go home.
The cry was this: ‘Olly-olly-ox-in-free.’
And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful —
‘Olly-olly-ox-in-free.’
{Howard W. Campbell Jr’s attic}
Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut
