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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c19ad57 | She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life | Jerry Spinelli | ||
| e3b66de | Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement. | relationships | Jerry Spinelli | |
| 4c24ba8 | Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no "time to waste." He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankle.. | Hannah Arendt | ||
| 429086e | Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill. | summer | Harper Lee | |
| 354b664 | I didn't know how you were going to do it, but from now on I'll never worry about what'll become of you, son, you'll always have an idea. | Harper Lee | ||
| d40172b | I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it. | Harper Lee | ||
| 913dba0 | Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets. | Harper Lee | ||
| e478400 | Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flied in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, af.. | Harper Lee | ||
| 8a27b56 | at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 56f181b | If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 03528bf | Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believ.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 21b46a1 | We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds 'romantic'; yet it is a blueprint for disaster. | Alain de Botton | ||
| e445929 | The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted .. | work nervous-energy relaxation coffee exhaustion | Alain de Botton | |
| 1755d7c | He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. | intelligence significance professionalism vulnerability | Alain de Botton | |
| 55b844e | I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Zoe one of the very saddest notions in love and life: sometimes the timing is wrong--and sometimes you realize the heart of the matter way to late in the game. | relationships | Emily Giffin | |
| b36a244 | The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey. | pluralism | William Blake | |
| 29906fb | It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are. | Irvine Welsh | ||
| d12b3fb | Ah walk doon Hammersmith Broadway, London seeming strange and alien, after only a three-month absence, as familiar places do when you've been away. It's as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the wey things are in a dream. They say you have to live in a place to know it, but you have to come fresh tae really see it. | Irvine Welsh | ||
| c37005c | don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another | Irvine Welsh | ||
| 96c6c87 | I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate | Doris Lessing | ||
| 7fcae9a | He was dirty, his hair unkempt, his clothes stained with blood. Heroes in stories somehow managed to rescue maidens while looking like court dandies. Next time he went adventuring he'd remember to bring a comb. | heroes hero | J.V. Jones | |
| 05fcbf7 | And hope is like love...a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing. | love | Kate DiCamillo | |
| 365776f | Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain. | Ann-Marie MacDonald | ||
| f75b85c | It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace." "It doesn't feel very all right." "That's because it's not the end." | David Mitchell | ||
| aad197d | I think about pinball, and how being a kid's like being shot up the firing lane and there's no veering left or right; or you're just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you're sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there's a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed'll totally alter what happens to you later, so a fraction of an inch to the right, and.. | David Mitchell | ||
| b5deefc | This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself. | David Mitchell | ||
| ca4fb26 | Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. | sex names | David Mitchell | |
| 4d94669 | But it's always taking a risk, when you ... kiss someone new. | Scott Westerfeld | ||
| cb320cb | Being an author sucks, doesn't it? It's like telling a joke and nobody laughs for two years. | Scott Westerfeld | ||
| 75286ce | I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle. | Mark Z. Danielewski | ||
| 4979065 | Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. | Silas House | ||
| 3c9b729 | I've never understood why people run to get out of the rain in the summertime... People will drive miles and miles to go jump in a cool swimming hole, but when it rains, they scatter. | Silas House | ||
| 8432807 | Who is Alice?" asked mother. "Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger" -- | Russell Hoban | ||
| a5b98d8 | employers sense in me a denial of their values...they fear me. i suspect that they can see that i am forced to function in a century which i loathe. | John Kennedy Toole | ||
| c5bf010 | If we go on to cast a look at the fate of world historical personalities... we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing but their master passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Casear; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon. | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | ||
| 5999e19 | I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman. | money murder women noir | James M. Cain | |
| 505a67a | In reality of everyday occurrences I've had to submit to people in order not to lose them. It's less the submission that bothers me, I guess, than how it makes my life miserable. And what happens if I can't forgive myself for making that choice? And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself? What am I supposed to do? Conclusion: It'd be best if I'm destroyed. The best thing is for me just to vanish. | suicide submission regret | Natsuo Kirino | |
| 816a19d | I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do. | women | Henry James | |
| d410e89 | Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. | Erich Fromm | ||
| a489706 | The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life - freedom. | Erich Fromm | ||
| 93d6712 | There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers. | Erich Fromm | ||
| d27f3c3 | I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| ab9e174 | Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark? | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e2d1b70 | The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake. | Philip Pullman |