Wednesday, April 22, 2015

24 Of The Most Beautiful Quotes About Nature

Celebrate Earth Day with these 24 wonderful quotes.

Jarry Lee / BuzzFeed / Thinkstock

2. "I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.'"
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

3. "Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me."
—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

4. "'Is the spring coming?' he said. 'What is it like?' ...
'It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth.'"
—Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Jarry Lee / BuzzFeed / Thinkstock

6. "If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

7. "The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning."
—Beth Revis, Across the Universe

8. "I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says 'Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.'"
―Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass


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21 Subtle Ways To Show Your Love Of Jane Austen

Aside from your quick wit and independence, that is.

Sense & Sensibility-themed cookies

Sense & Sensibility-themed cookies

Perfect for tea time! Etsy, $30.75.

Via etsy.com

Jane Austen Print Hair Bow

Jane Austen Print Hair Bow

For an up-do worthy of any ball. Etsy in multiple colors, $22.

Via etsy.com

Pride & Prejudice Locales T-Shirt

Pride & Prejudice Locales T-Shirt

Doubles as your fantasy vacation bucket list. Etsy in multiple styles, $24.

Via etsy.com

Jane Austen Quote Pillow

Jane Austen Quote Pillow

May you learn to live with it, too. Etsy, $22.

Via etsy.com


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How A First Edition Of "The Iliad" Ended Up In "The Boy Next Door"

Director Rob Cohen explains how the talked about prop made its way into Jennifer Lopez’s hands.

Universal

When The Boy Next Door hit theaters in January, it gave audiences a lot to talk about (that sex scene, a shiver-inducing eye-wound, and the line, "I love your mother's cookies"). But the most talked and tweeted about moment actually involved a first edition of Homer's The Iliad.

In the film, which is available April 28 on Blu-ray and DVD, Noah (Ryan Guzman) begins seducing high school English teacher Claire (Jennifer Lopez) by gifting her with a beautifully bound first edition of Homer's tale, which he claims to have found at a garage sale.

Viewers griped that even if the book was centuries old, it would have cost a fortune. And one of the people complaining was the film's screenwriter, Barbara Curry, who told Fusion that she was not responsible for the scene in question. "Much of my original script was rewritten by the producers and the director," she said. "As for the first edition Iliad reference in the movie, that was not something I wrote in my original script."

Universal

The Boy Next Door director Rob Cohen told BuzzFeed News he added the scene during normal script rewrites. "I wanted [Noah] to have a reason to come see [Claire] when [her family] went on the camping trip," he said during a recent phone interview. "He had to find a reason and my reasoning was he went to a first edition book store, bought her the first edition, and told her it was from a garage sale so she wouldn't be uncomfortable that he bought her an expensive gift. It gave them a chance to be together alone for the first time where if anything was going to happen, it could happen."

While the Iliad-based audience criticism irked Cohen a bit, he said "that tells me they're watching and listening and thinking and they're engaged; even if they think we're idiots, I'm not an idiot. I'm a book collector and I know about first editions."

"You can have a first edition that was printed yesterday," Cohen added. "What happens is books are published in editions. Like you'll get the The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton. I own the first edition from 1653, but there have been over 1,000 first editions since. So an imprint will publish a new version and that book is the first edition of that version. The older the first edition, the more valuable. But it doesn't mean it was the original printing. It just means someone decided the book had relevance of commerciality and they printed it with new photos or a new dust jacket and that's known as a first edition."

"So I wasn't saying, 'Oh, it's a first edition of the original Homer,' because if you know anything about Homer you know it was an oral tradition," Cohen said. "It wasn't written down 'til later — so there is no such thing unless you are showing squirrels in Greek on parchment."


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Can You Match The Musician To Their Literary Masterpiece?

You’ll never guess which rapper moonlights as a children’s book author.

32 Terrible Dating Tips For Women From The '80s

How to Be Popular With Boys by Stacy Rubis — an advice book about love, dating, and romance for teenage girls — was published in 1984. Here are 32 of the most ridiculous quotes from the book.

Crown Publishers

1. "Do you know the one quality boys can't resist? It's innocence."

2. "When you're shy and natural, boys instinctively feel, 'Here's a girl I can believe...She doesn't have anything up her sleeve...She won't hurt me or humiliate me.'"

3. "Boys get an ego boost from your awkwardness. It makes them feel more incontrol, more manly. And at the same time they get more protective toward shy, trembling you."

5. "Most guys are afraid of a girl saying 'No,' they lose sleep over it. And they go out of their way to avoid the humiliation of rejection, even if it means passing up the chance to have a close girl friend—and being lonely all through high school."

6. "If you appear to be 'boy crazy,' guys won't be crazy about you. They won't trust you or respect you. You might even get a bad reputation. 'Oh, she's so desperate...' or 'She'll go after anything in pants.' None of this will help you become popular."

Losw / Getty Images

7. "Sometimes, when [sweet] girls are with a guy, they put up an impenetrable wall. They act hard, or nonchalant, or they are sarcastic. It's just a defense, to be sure, but how are boys supposed to know that? I have girlfriends who are just the shyest, nicest, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly kind of people. And yet I've heard boys ask again and again, 'How could you be friends with her, she's such a snob?' or 'She's so cold, how can you hang around with her?' What a shame that these girls are completely misunderstood."

8. "Many boys think it's sissylike to show affection. They think it's uncool, feminine. And a boy will be darned if he's going to act feminine. So he'll ignore you. Or make crude jokes in your presence. Or flirt with your girl friends instead of you."

9. "Don't let his coolness drive you away."

10. "Be understanding, but don't be a fool."

11. "Don't tell your girl friends every last detail about your relationship with a boy, at least not in a gossipy way. A guy can feel very embarrassed — and bitter — knowing that your girl friends get a play-by-play each time he calls you, asks you out on a date, or kisses you."


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Why Being A Debut Author Isn't Exactly A Dream Come True

“It sure would be nice to have some folks to talk to.”

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

Writers share a lot of personal stuff online. Which books are lining their "to be read" shelves, what they had for brunch, the fact that they had brunch, how many thousands of words they're in to their new projects. But with few exceptions, even the most socially active writers shy away from sharing the darker moments of their debut book experiences.

This silence comes from a place of professional, grown-up restraint: For most writers, publishing a book is the achievement of a lifetime dream and only the most tasteless of people would talk negatively about it. But having been a debut novelist myself, I've come to feel like we need more transparency around this rite of passage. The necessary gleefulness embedded in publication-related social media posts can make the first-time author thing look like a carnival of successful signings and carpal tunnel massages to the uninitiated. The reality, I'm afraid, is more like you're sitting alone, post-carnival, on a cigarette-butt encrusted patch of grass typing your own name into Bing, but other than that you're feeling super-duper lucky. Everything is great!

The trip from struggling writer to published author is a vision quest that takes place in a protected area bordered on all sides by strip malls. It is like sitting at a dinner table in haute couture with a dirty diaper on. For a lot of writers, it will prove to be the most emotionally unsteady period of their lives. It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test.

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

Let's start out with the pre-publication period, or, as I like to call it, When You Lose Your Friends. If you're anything like I was before I had a book deal, there was nothing I liked more than getting together over a basket of pre-frozen French fries to groan about the writing life with my writing friends. Tallying up rejections from different magazines, discussing which publications did and didn't pay, bitching about the undeserved advance that just fell down from the heavens on some undeserving writer's head.

Now, the elephant in the beer garden during such discussions was that all of us secretly wanted to possess that lucky head. Or rather, we felt secretly bolstered by the knowledge that we already had that head, it was just a matter of time until the publishing industry awakened to our genius and slapped a book advance on it.

But let me tell you what it's like when the unthinkable happens, and that book advance arrives. All of a sudden, you're not a struggling writer any more, you're the recipient of a golden one-way ticket to The Other Side. No matter that your new employer offers no health insurance or job security whatsoever, your ship has come in and if other authors' Instagram feeds are any evidence, it's carrying paid speaking engagements and loads of free white wine.

This is really exciting, though! Look, you've actually made it! It is time to be proud! You want to celebrate with your writer buddies, but since you got your book deal, they no longer share their pre-frozen fries with you. In fact, they've started adjusting their postures when you're near them. They stop conversations short. Having been swept up by Editor Charming, you're not one of the underdogs any more. You're not one of them.

You have a book coming out though, so you're feeling benevolent. You understand their hostility — well, heck! So you stay out of the way of your former writing pals. You hope this is a situation that time and their own future book deals (fingers crossed!) will mend. Except of course for Jeffrey, who's working on a collection of experimental short fiction. You'll never talk to him again!


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