Jitterbug Quotes

“I can text in complete sentences. Oh, yeah, it’s a skill.” He smiled, proud of his accomplishments. “And, thanks to my mom being a competitive dancer as a teen, I know how to do the Lindy hop and the jitterbug.”I sat bolt upright, and Akinli rolled his eyes.“I swear, if you tell me you can jitterbug, I’m going to . . . I don’t even know. Set something on fire. No one can dance like that.”I pursed my lips and dusted off my shoulder, a thing I’d seen Elizabeth do when she was bragging.As if he was accepting a challenge, he shrugged off his backpack and stood, holding out a hand for me.I took it and positioned myself in front of him as he shook his head, grinning.“All right, we’ll take this slow. Five, six, seven, eight.”In unison, we rock stepped and triple stepped, falling into the rhythm in our head. After a minute, he got brave and swung me around, lining me up for those peppy kicks I loved so much.People walked by, pointing and laughing, but it was one of those moments when I knew we weren’t being mocked; we were being envied.We stepped on each other’s toes more than once, and after he accidentally knocked his head into my shoulder, he threw his hands up.“Unbelievable,” he said, almost as if he was complaining. “I can’t wait to tell my mom this. She’s gonna think I’m lying. All those years dancing in the kitchen thinking I was special, and then I run across a master.”

“I can text in complete sentences. Oh, yeah, it’s a skill.” He smiled, proud of his accomplishments. “And, thanks to my mom being a competitive dancer as a teen, I know how to do the Lindy hop and the jitterbug.”I sat bolt upright, and Akinli rolled his eyes.“I swear, if you tell me you can jitterbug, I’m going to . . . I don’t even know. Set something on fire. No one can dance like that.”I pursed my lips and dusted off my shoulder, a thing I’d seen Elizabeth do when she was bragging.As if he was accepting a challenge, he shrugged off his backpack and stood, holding out a hand for me.I took it and positioned myself in front of him as he shook his head, grinning.“All right, we’ll take this slow. Five, six, seven, eight.”In unison, we rock stepped and triple stepped, falling into the rhythm in our head. After a minute, he got brave and swung me around, lining me up for those peppy kicks I loved so much.People walked by, pointing and laughing, but it was one of those moments when I knew we weren’t being mocked; we were being envied.We stepped on each other’s toes more than once, and after he accidentally knocked his head into my shoulder, he threw his hands up.“Unbelievable,” he said, almost as if he was complaining. “I can’t wait to tell my mom this. She’s gonna think I’m lying. All those years dancing in the kitchen thinking I was special, and then I run across a master.”

“They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.”

“But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.”

“Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.”

“The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.”

“Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.”

“If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.”

“Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.”

“Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.”

“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.”