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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b1f3c9c | Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 36b8270 | In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is m.. | nature-and-man meaninglessness | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 67135a9 | And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day. | dreams | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 86a8792 | So the Midwest nourishes us [...] and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters [...]. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for .. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0cb31ce | I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake. | Annie Dillard | ||
| e699784 | Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance... | stillness | Annie Dillard | |
| 473714d | Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet. | nature landscape walking | Annie Dillard | |
| b50b409 | I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 62cc35e | Ram Dass, who described himself as a Hin-Jew, said that ultimately we're all just walking each other home. I love that. I try to live by it. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 41011d8 | When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down. | teaching children | Anne Lamott | |
| 95c9cc3 | Was there ever a true great love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections? I honestly don't think so. In part, this was my fault. It was my nature, I suppose. I could not let myself be that unmindful. Isn't that what love is-losing your mind? You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's fault, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind.. | Amy Tan | ||
| 666d54f | You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who's saved? Who's not? | Amy Tan | ||
| d990a2e | Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried. | Eudora Welty | ||
| c9ef64a | One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. | literature | Anne Fadiman | |
| d50868e | Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself. | writer writing muses paper pen | Anne Fadiman | |
| 3f4dcb9 | Believe me, I know people who have doting Grandmas. Jessica's Grandma Pearl spent four years knitting her a blanket. And she's got arthritis. I wonder what Grandma Pearl would think if she knew Jessica lost her virginity to Michael Greenberg under the blanket she spent four years knitting with her crooked fingers. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| a06a72a | I want a one hundred percent guarantee that they'll all be fine." I tell Mrs. Garcia. She pats my knee. "Unfortunately, there are no guarantees in life." | mrs-garcia | Simone Elkeles | |
| 1d239e9 | there's no rule book or game plan when it comes to the grim realities of our lives. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| c9e5b55 | You make me believe in love, which I'd give up on. Thank you for proving to me it's not just a fairy tale. | love lovers-love-story | Simone Elkeles | |
| a2faf97 | When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love. | love | Salman Rushdie | |
| 4af0cea | Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it w.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| a489c83 | Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 89342dd | Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the a.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| e4dd9a2 | for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our drea.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 8a4330e | My heart broke open and history fell in. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 8cb02a9 | One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidifi.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 130e966 | A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| b16106a | They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| eaf97e5 | This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike . | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 2a7e18e | A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape. | history | Salman Rushdie | |
| 15ba25f | When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 690cbca | Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury -- sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal -- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at hi.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 341b0ea | It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| e7fe7c3 | She was a marvel. She did exactly as she pleased all her life, God bless her. | John Berendt | ||
| e8c1962 | The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| f160d90 | Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end; Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 8d4afcc | Alas, the frailty is to blame, not we For such as we are made of, such we be | William Shakespeare | ||
| 58c28d6 | Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself. | english-literature drama | William Shakespeare | |
| 07d3ffb | thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 66fe605 | How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it! | William Shakespeare | ||
| a55b86f | Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? - Lady Macbeth | William Shakespeare | ||
| be2d574 | It puzzles the will. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 9fb653a | It is far easier for me to teach twenty what were right to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. | William Shakespeare | ||
| eba07bc | I have drunk and seen the spider. | William Shakespeare |