1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1099
1100
1101
1102
1103
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2d58353 | thats why you cant be worried about the world. theyll just do you in anyway. you can't depend on them because sooner or later theyll turn on you or just disapear and leave you there alone. | Hubert Selby Jr. | ||
| 75e86f4 | There's no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way. | Philip Roth | ||
| 8ee8efe | But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am? | Charles Baudelaire | ||
| 041e78f | Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage, Traverse ca et la par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils. | Charles Baudelaire | ||
| 89e2280 | Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; des monstres l'ont mange. | Charles Baudelaire | ||
| 436df0a | I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books? | Lori Lansens | ||
| 7b6e025 | Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure. | religion | Terry Pratchett | |
| 2253234 | The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip. | insanity turnip | Terry Pratchett | |
| 46486ef | Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 4e760f8 | It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen. | death humor | Terry Pratchett | |
| eed5be2 | Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades. Words like 'full', 'round' and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the.. | fantasy humor women | Terry Pratchett | |
| 6888ce1 | The Librarian considered matters for a while. So...a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and r.. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| e15f488 | This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way around. | life mirrors | Terry Pratchett | |
| aefa720 | Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed you, not you. It was very hard. But she could do it! | Terry Pratchett | ||
| ab03a83 | Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. | humor | Terry Pratchett | |
| 9b63997 | But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance. | finance gold rainbow | Terry Pratchett | |
| 0618ebe | BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT, IS THAT THE IDEA? "That's about the size of it, master. A good god line, that. Don't give 'em too much and tell 'em to be happy with it. Jam tomorrow, see." THIS IS WRONG. Death hesitated. I MEAN...IT'S RIGHT TO BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT. BUT YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BE HAPPY ABOUT HAVING. THERE'S NO POINT IN BEING HAPPY ABOUT HAVING NOTHING." | Terry Pratchett | ||
| d1a222e | No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up to the evolutionary ladder. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 5885e52 | Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 5691c16 | Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| b2b8550 | I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find out what they are good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it is too late. There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can't, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will tur.. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| d3af3a7 | Shoes, men, coffins; never accept the first one you see. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| a108337 | Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| f34d028 | Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam. "Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?" "'cos they torture people." | police pratchett torture vimes | Terry Pratchett | |
| ea5b767 | I hit walls of past pleasure all the time, and for me past pleasure is much harder to process then past pain...for me the traumas of the past are mercifully far away. The pleasures of the past however, are tough...the worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idolizes or deplores. | Andrew Solomon | ||
| 125af91 | At seventeen I'm waiting for my life to actually begin. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow eighty years old and I WILL STILL BE WAITING. | initiative | Frank Warren | |
| 5c8683d | Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?' Everything in the room seems to hold its breath. Henry stiffens but doesn't say anything. I lean forward and smile at Mr. DeTamble and say, with enthusiasm, as though he has asked me what flavor of ice cream I like best: 'Because he's really, good in bed.' In the kitchen there's a howl of laughter. Mr. DeTamble glances at Henry, who raises his eyebrows and gri.. | Audrey Niffenegger | ||
| c5aa550 | It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2aa9def | Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 32740f3 | There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop. | Donna Tartt | ||
| bddd4a3 | I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 38563fd | I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6a296ec | She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief. | Donna Tartt | ||
| e9e383d | Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker. | queen the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 6c41041 | Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 9202564 | It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them... | Donna Tartt | ||
| d3693e6 | He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word "postmodernist." | Donna Tartt | ||
| d8cce14 | For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1e77c97 | From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . . | Donna Tartt | ||
| 75fbecb | isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0354bbd | Hobie's reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn't felt a touch like that since my mother died--friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events--and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nob.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 21acd64 | Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been. | life | Richard Matheson | |
| 93b2b21 | When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn't it? | Richard Matheson | ||
| 5708e1b | I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it. | murder temper | Susanna Clarke |