Posts tagged nineteen minutes
Maggie May
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
So I finished Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult today after a few days of posting quotes from this book. I like her books better when the chapters are named after the character it is in the persepective of. This one was kind of jumbled and all over the place, but after the first ten pages or so I caught on.
Compelling, definitely, and it really makes you wonder. A story about bullying and cliques in school and the affects of this. I don’t want to give anything away but I do recommend reading it. Like many of Picoult’s novels it is another court case, where each chapter is a date in time. Venturing into the past of the characters, background information is given that makes you fall in love with both the defendent and the prosecutors. For me I almost wanted the defendent to win because of everything that was told about his past.
Picoult also seems to have a chapter at the end of the books that is so short and yet it is drastic and dramatic. I guess that’s how she likes to end ‘em :). I’m debating on reading another Jodi Picoult book, a Nicholas Sparks book or even a more scholarly John Steinbeck book next.
Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child — not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?
I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut — the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.
There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there.
Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grany no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing over and over again.
If he asked her right now, she wouldn’t answer, because answering was the surest way to get your heart handed back to you.
read in the sun all day 8) less than 100 pages to go! will finish it by tonight
Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didnt, when what you dreamed or hopped or — in this case — feared might come to pass passed by instead.
I’ve always sort of wondered though: If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?
Josie wanted to ask Matt whether it had hurt the first time he had done it too. She wondered if it always hurt. Maybe pain was the price everyone paid for love. She turned her face into Matt’s shoulder and tried to understand why, even with him still inside of her, she felt empty.
She had nothing left inside. She’d given it all to her son. And that was the greatest heartbreak of all — no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damages, through and through.
Although they never saw each other outside of school — and hadn’t in years, thanks to some blowout fight between his mother and hers that neither of them remember the details about — Josie still hung out with Peter. And thank God for that, because no one else really did. They sat together during lunch, they read each other’s rough drafts in English, they were always each other’s lab partners. Summers were always tough. They could email, and every now and then they saw each other at the town pond, but that was about it. And then, come September, they fell back in step as if they’d never missed a beat. That, Peter figured, was the very definition of a best friend.
If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?
She kept thinking of a line from Romeo and Juliet that had freaked her out when they’d studied the play in ninth grade: “With worms that are thy chambermaids.” Romeo had said it to Juliet’s looks-like-dead body in the Capulet crypt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But there were a whole bunch of steps in between that no one ever talked about.
Whether or not you believe in fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s all your fault — that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?
I know people who’ll hear about the people who died, and say it was God’s will. I know people who’ll say it was bad luck. And then here’s my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask … with nothing beneath it?
Nobody wants to admit this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s becase it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
