Jules Cassard Quotes

“Did somebody die?”“Yes,” I replied.“Who?” he asked, starting to freak out. I pulled out my notepad and asked him if he knew a Marcie Tucker. “Marcie? Hm, Marcie, it doesn't ring a bell but… Oh yeah, the temp who's filling in while my regular assistant is out, I think her name is Marcie. In fact, she was supposed to be here today. I was actually starting to worry that… Wait. Is she…”“Unfortunately yes,” I said, “Marcie was found in her apartment late last night uh… no longer alive.” My bedside manner has never been my strong suit.Dr. Taggart looked distressed and began to ramble incoherently for a minute. I let him work through it though, I figured it was his way of grieving. I wouldn't have even paid attention to it except for the fact that it was kind of goofily, ineptly… well, poignant:"Oh, uh, Oh my God. That's terrible. I uh… I hope she didn't have any family. I mean, I don't hope she didn't have any family, what I mean is, if she uh… if she didn't have any family then there would be nobody to get all bummed out about this and uh… you know, when something like this happens, you always think about the poor, heartbroken family, so uh… if she doesn't have any family then uh… the bright side would be that nobody would, you know, have to be all bummed out."Hm. I guess I never thought of it that way. Awkward wording aside, he's kind of got a point there.”

“In the discovery of secret things, and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.”

“Jules lips quivered, and I feared she was about to cry. Then she asked, “He bit off more than he could chew, didn’t he?” She made a motion as if she was biting into a tough piece of steak.Gabriella’s lips sealed shut as she tried to hide her grin, though she failed at it when Andrew asked, “Was he eating?” He turned desperately to Gabriella, confused.Jules wasn’t about to cry, she was trying not to laugh! She giggled then, the sound tinkling and odd in the outlandish setting.Andrew straightened and shook his head at Gabriella. “Did you see him eat?”

“I want to pick up a few other items at the house,” Jules said as Katie stepped around the car. “I still have my roller skates and yours in my closet.”Katie opened the door and paused, staring at Jules.“What?” Jules asked.“Are you serious? Our lives are in danger and you want to get our roller skates?”

“The truly free man is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.”

“If one were to build the house of happiness, the largest space would be the waiting room.”

“[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.”

“This cat is looking at me with judgment.”“He’s not,” said Jules. “That’s just his face.”“You look at me the same way,” Mark said, glancing at Julian. “Judgy face.”

“There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”

“Try repeating “man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evolution or perhaps by exposure to a primitive tribe or by being raised on a farm. Primitives sometimes see little difference between themselves and the animals around them. Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that they monkeys lacked the bow and arrow. And Jules Henry observed on the Kningang that dogs are not considered pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. Thus we say that a sheep “drops" its lamb, but a woman “gives birth"—it’s much more noble. Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things; we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize naturally on the privilege.”