Line By Line: Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal

“It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.”

“I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.”

“Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.” 

“There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.”

“We are bound by the secrets we share."

Line By Line: Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

"It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again..."

"At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror."

"It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this, it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom."

"It is frightening, and also exhilarating, her ability to deceive those around her; this is something new, her lost hours, her vivid dreams and shreds of language, as though she'd been given two lives instead of one, the alternate life cloaked in secret."

"He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature, it is the wish to escape that which he can't comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement."

Line By Line: E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

"And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

"Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore."

"Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt like he was a pin in the hinge of power."

"A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction."

"If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he
had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it."

Table of Contents: When I Was Puerto Rican

Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Publisher/Year: Random House, 1993
Synopsis: Esmeralda Santiago passes her childhood as a jíbara, a Puerto Rican country girl, living in a small village. Her life changes when she is thirteen, and she moves to New York City, where being Puerto Rican means occupying an indeterminate place in a bewildering hierarchy of Blacks, Jews, and Italians.

How Esmeralda overcomes adversity and eventually wins acceptance to New York City's High School of Performing Arts is a record of a tremendous journey, and a remarkable and affirming story of the changes brought to a young mind as it experiences poverty, love, despair, adolescence, cultural confusion, and hope.

What Others Have To Say:

Entertainment Weekly
"Puerto Rico is part of America, but Santiago illuminates the brilliantly hued chasm between them."

Booklist
"When in the epilogue Santiago refers to her studies at Harvard, it is both a stirring and poignant reminder of the capacities of the human spirit."

The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"What is particularly appealing about Santiago's story is the insight it offers to readers unaware of the double bind Puerto Rican Americans find themselves in: the identity in conflict. Is [she] black or white? Is she rural or urban? Even more importantly, is she Puerto Rican or is she American? [One] can only be grateful that Esmeralda Santiago has chosen to explore her culture and share what she has found."

San Juan Star
"You will see how one particular woman's journey from a rippled metal shack in a Puerto Rican countryside barrio becomes a story rich in reverberations about all those who have made a transforming physical and spiritual journey in life."

Extras:
Readers Guide