Lullabies for Little Criminals
Oh my goodness, how I LOVE this book! Heather O'Neill is a GENIUS! This is one of my favorite passages:
"If Jules was the type of person all the time that he was in Xavier's eyes, then things would be okay for him. Then again, if I was the type of person all the time that I was in Xavier's eyes, I think I'd also be okay. Wouldn't that be a nice life? Xavier wasn't put on earth to witness the bad things like Jules and I were. He had been put here to ... Read Morenotice lovely things, things that God had created and no one had any complaints about. Leaves turning red in autumn. How when the tide goes out, the shells are left on the shore. I was put here - Jules and I were both put here - to see sadder things. We had to stand in the rain and explain why the world was a lovely place." (page 246)
this is another of my favorite parts:
"One night, during our unsupervised half hour, I went out into the yard for a smoke. I didn't like the taste, but I liked to watch the smoke roll out of my mouth, like unicorns. It had snowed for the first time that year and now it was winter. The world got all quiet after it snowed, as though everything and everyone had died. I used to sit out there and imagine that the bomb had fallen. Back then everyone used to speculate on what life would be like after the bomb.
After the bomb, I figured that buttons would be used as currency. Once you traded your buttons for something to eat, you would have to hold your sweater together with your hands. There would be only one lightbulb in town, and you would have to pay dearly to sit underneath it. You would pack your suitcase full of the screws you had managed to find here and there and move to another city in the middle of the night, hoping it hadn't been hit as hard. At the flea market, you would buy a tape of someone screaming at their wife in the apartment next door because you would miss the sounds of ordinary life.
It would be hard to laugh anymore. You would have to pay a prostitute to tickle you and to read to you from a paperback book of jokes. It would be time for the androids to take over, but they would not have been invented yet. Certain fanatics would volunteer to have their limbs replaced with prosthetic ones." (page 191)
"If Jules was the type of person all the time that he was in Xavier's eyes, then things would be okay for him. Then again, if I was the type of person all the time that I was in Xavier's eyes, I think I'd also be okay. Wouldn't that be a nice life? Xavier wasn't put on earth to witness the bad things like Jules and I were. He had been put here to ... Read Morenotice lovely things, things that God had created and no one had any complaints about. Leaves turning red in autumn. How when the tide goes out, the shells are left on the shore. I was put here - Jules and I were both put here - to see sadder things. We had to stand in the rain and explain why the world was a lovely place." (page 246)
this is another of my favorite parts:
"One night, during our unsupervised half hour, I went out into the yard for a smoke. I didn't like the taste, but I liked to watch the smoke roll out of my mouth, like unicorns. It had snowed for the first time that year and now it was winter. The world got all quiet after it snowed, as though everything and everyone had died. I used to sit out there and imagine that the bomb had fallen. Back then everyone used to speculate on what life would be like after the bomb.
After the bomb, I figured that buttons would be used as currency. Once you traded your buttons for something to eat, you would have to hold your sweater together with your hands. There would be only one lightbulb in town, and you would have to pay dearly to sit underneath it. You would pack your suitcase full of the screws you had managed to find here and there and move to another city in the middle of the night, hoping it hadn't been hit as hard. At the flea market, you would buy a tape of someone screaming at their wife in the apartment next door because you would miss the sounds of ordinary life.
It would be hard to laugh anymore. You would have to pay a prostitute to tickle you and to read to you from a paperback book of jokes. It would be time for the androids to take over, but they would not have been invented yet. Certain fanatics would volunteer to have their limbs replaced with prosthetic ones." (page 191)