I collect quotes for my sig file. When I read books I own, or those I have obtained via bookray, I copy the quotes into a Bookcrossing.com journal entry. I didn't have a system for keeping quotes from library books. In the middle of the night I had a harebrained idea to make a journal entry here for such books.
So here goes...
For: --"A Girl From Yamhill. A Memoir," by Beverly Cleary, c. 1988
Even though I felt guilty, a social failure and disappointment to my mother, I did not want to go to a Fourth of July picnic. I wanted a real job, or I wanted to be left alone to lie on my bed in my room and read Willa Cather.
My reading, secluded in my room with the door shut, annoyed Mother. She constantly talked to me through the door and accused me of being snooty. I was not snooty. I was confused and unhappy, and wanted time to think without Mother telling me what to think. p241
[comment: I could relate to this teenager]
The first thing we decided to do, on a warm summer day when the air of Portland was rich with the rotten-cabbage smell of paper mills, was use our new adult library cards.
We timidly approached the adult half of the book collection, choosing almost at random before we slipped back to the children's side of the room for old favorites. p172
[comment: This quote brings memories of the time when I got my own library card]
Mother was tense and apprehensive. I continued to overhear shreds of anxious conversation about my future.
What future, I wondered, and why couldn't my parents speak directly to me about it? I wanted to write; writing was expected of me, but what did I, an ordinary girl, have to write about? I could not depend on my pen and imagination for a living. I visualized nothign beyond, perhaps, business school and a dull office job - if I could find one, and I did not want to find one. An office meant one thing: typewriting. p253