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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0bc0683 | Looking at the tree) Pity we haven't got a bit of rope. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 044e508 | You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirt of your great coat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at the last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. To be gone.Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself.. | samuel-beckett | Samuel Beckett | |
| 19af1fe | Clov: If I don't kill the rat, he'll die. Hamm: That's right. | Samuel Beckett | ||
| 0f86259 | We all are weak, in one way or another. It does not matter the species. Some times that weakness is a strength in dusguise. Sometimes it is our utter undoing. Some times it is both. A wise man seeks to find a lesson from it. A fool lets it control and destroy him. And sometimes the wise man is the fool. | Christie Golden | ||
| 1004f71 | JERRY: Look at the way you're looking at me. I can't wait for you. I'm bowled over, I'm totally knocked out, you dazzle me, you jewel, my jewel, I can't ever sleep again, no, listen, it's the truth, I won't walk, I'll be a cripple, I'll descend, I'll diminish, into total paralysis, my life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to, a state of catatonia, do you know the state of catatonia? do you? do you? the state of...where the .. | Harold Pinter | ||
| 93d16f8 | There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong. | David Adams Richards | ||
| 622d1ad | Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 87b10bf | Nymphets do not occur in polar regions. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| abb839f | She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4aa1f83 | The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| afd7fdb | We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. With Dickens we expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen's fiction had been a charming re-arrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens, the values are n.. | nabokov literary-fiction lectures | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 42e3733 | a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one's watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 682966d | one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and .. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| a395203 | When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. | Nathaniel Hawthorne | ||
| c817929 | Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm. | media | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 426f949 | The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. | Richard Russo | ||
| 50a7f05 | Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part. | Richard Ford | ||
| a346e75 | He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0bd748d | Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away. | Annie Dillard | ||
| e4d1daa | We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence... | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5b6b6e6 | Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. | pain life | Anne Lamott | |
| 5ef223a | Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back. | gratitude joy | Anne Lamott | |
| 7bdd965 | Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed? | jesus | Anne Lamott | |
| e3e1f47 | Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 9142a1f | I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 12ecb33 | To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch yo.. | space-travel | Mary Roach | |
| c000a8b | Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag. | marriage humor trophy-wives | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 3795911 | there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: "He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute." | insightful | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| c9ca14d | This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 7192270 | Si eres pequeno y aquello de lo que te evades es grande (?no han tenido nunca este sueno?), el unico escondrijo posible es algun reducto muy pequeno en el que la cosa grande no pueda entrar. Pero lo malo es que tienes que quedarte ahi, en ese sitio tan pequeno, y a veces hasta encogerte para retroceder mas aun. Estoy cansado de ese sitio tan pequeno. Estoy hasta los putos huevos de ese sitio tan diminuto. Estoy harto de que me miren sin yo .. | Martin Amis | ||
| 2e28c19 | Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl. How could I not love this man? But it was a love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness. Now Saint i.. | love mother | Amy Tan | |
| 967ccf0 | She cried, 'No choice! No choice!' She doesn't know. If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. and even though I taught my daughter the opposite, she still came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. .. | Amy Tan | ||
| 246e503 | When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos... | Anne Fadiman | ||
| f3591bc | To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| faf6fed | There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years-I include here the Democratic opposition-there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, .. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| 62ba8e1 | Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning. | 2006-lebanon-war 2009 thomas-friedman the-new-york-times western-world lebanon other reasoning hypocrisy israel | Noam Chomsky | |
| 94b1527 | More than anything, it was the blue dolphins that took me back home. | Scott O'Dell | ||
| cf37e08 | You're not the only one in this relationship who loves a challenge," he says. "And just so you know for the future, I like my double-chocolate chip cookies warm and soft in the middle . . . and without magnets glued to them." | funny humor kiara-westford conversation | Simone Elkeles | |
| b223e5f | I'm not going anywhere until you hear me out." Oh, please no. Anything except having to listen to her lecture. I push the button that calls the nurse. a voice bellows through the speaker. "I'm bein' tortured." | humour romance young-adult-romance young-adult-fiction | Simone Elkeles | |
| 7dc7ae9 | We need to look back sometimes and realize the past taught us to appreciate our future. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| e18be2c | I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| da824f8 | We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more .. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 7a7bbe0 | For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 4bf1df0 | Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending toget.. | reality parallel-universe pragmatism | Salman Rushdie |