1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
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 |
| cecd3d8 | In Irena's head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears. | sex personality drinking poetry writing love forgetting forget poet | Milan Kundera | |
| c431345 | Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And t.. | writing work humor | Nick Hornby | |
| aed45fb | Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? | relationships | Nick Hornby | |
| 4745f7c | Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 9ffa811 | But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery? | Nick Hornby | ||
| 7fd2f96 | I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 1910cca | Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me. | funny | Tad Williams | |
| 91a1499 | Is that what you think of when you think of me?" Gogol asks him. "Do I remind you of that night"? "Not at all", his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed." -- | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 60edcd0 | War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war, | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| b89fceb | El conocimiento de la verdad no alivia la tristeza que sentimos al perder a un ser querido. Ni la verdad, ni la sinceridad, ni la fuerza, ni el carino son capaces de curar esa tristeza. Lo unico que puede hacerse es atravesar este dolor esperando aprender algo de el, aunque todo lo que uno haya aprendido no le sirva para nada la proxima vez que la tristeza lo visite de improviso. | duelo norwegian-wood perdida tristeza | Haruki Murakami | |
| 127d1b8 | I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 6c9871e | Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed." | loss midway pride | Haruki Murakami | |
| 86c792b | Some things in life are just to complicated to explain in any language.' Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 6f3872b | You're wasting your life being involved with me." "I'm not wasting anything." "But I might never recover. Will you wait for me forever? Can you wait 10 years, 20 years?" "You're letting yourself be scared by too many things," I said. "The dark, bad dreams, the power of the dead. You have to forget them. I'm sure you'll get well if you do." "If I can," said Naoko, shaking her head. "If you can get out of this place, will you live with me?" I.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 04e9209 | You're walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, 'Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?' So you and the bear spend the whole day in each other's arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill. Nice, huh? | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 10c7195 | The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 69322c5 | Not just beautiful, though -- the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. What I've up till now, what I'm going to do -- they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart's pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I've never given them .. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| bacf392 | I have always loved Naoko, and I still love her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me. It has an irresistible power that is bound to sweep me into the future. What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5083df5 | Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 8293a6a | I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it. | worldview | Haruki Murakami | |
| 109fa2e | The feel of her hand has never left me. It was different from any other hand I'd ever held, different from any touch I've ever known. It was merely the small, warm hand of a twelve-year-old girl, yet those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed... | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 3407b6f | This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 0a7fea1 | If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing? | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d64ea89 | No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| c6f7f88 | Paul's face grew serious. 'I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not amo.. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| d479197 | Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'. | Fritjof Capra | ||
| 7682ec9 | The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the , the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. | Laurie R. King | ||
| fb13b3b | At times he felt that he had almost rather not be in love with her, for it brought him no peace. What was the use of it, if it was only going to be painful? | love no-peace not-rather disappointed felt times feeling her what-if painful use in-love | Larry McMurtry | |
| d277217 | and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood. | Kim Edwards | ||
| ac6687e | You're not worried about anything, are you?" said Danglers. "It seems to me everything's going perfectly for you." "That's exactly what worries me," replied Dantes. "I don't think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it." -- | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 584e781 | To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. | Walker Percy | ||
| 0e67921 | I believe every...man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs to back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else. | James Lee Burke | ||
| 27a93af | Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know? | Woody Allen | ||
| 8a101b3 | So, I can hurt now, or hurt later. | Steve Martin | ||
| 1e82e09 | they worry about my sanity i join with them on that | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| c03b282 | Imagine you had a friend who was there for you all the time and you were there for them, but they stopped being there for you as much as they used to which you can understand a little because people have things to do, but then they're around less and less no matter how much you try to reach out to them. Then suddenly one day - nothing - they're gone. Just like that. Then you write to them, and you're ignored, and then you write to them agai.. | time quote life lesson | Cecelia Ahern | |
| ad5aa65 | Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight. | quote love | Cecelia Ahern | |
| 4c7971d | the important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life. | friendship | Cecelia Ahern | |
| e45a42b | That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You're both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds. | life inspirational | Cecelia Ahern | |
| 86fe157 | Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow. | hope life love inspirational lesson | Cecelia Ahern | |
| 100c343 | Somewhere along the way, without me even noticing, I grew up Alex. For once, I couldn't take advice from anyone around me about what I should or shouldn't do. I couldn't go running to mum and dad and I can't compare my marriage to anybody else's, we all follow our own rules. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| 6d9c229 | It's hard for everyone isn't it? Anyone who says it's easy is a liar. There's this huge divide between me and Alex right now because I feel like we're living in such different worlds, I don't know what to talk about with him anymore. And we used to be able to talk all night. He phones once a week and I listen to what he's been up to during the week and try to bite my tongue every time I go into another Katie story. Truth is I have nothing o.. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| c356972 | Katie is like my calendar, watching her grow and change. She is growing up so fast, learning to have opinions of her own, learning that I don't have the answers to everything. And the moment a child begins to understand that, you know you're in trouble. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| 3fde918 | Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down. | nurses | Jodi Picoult |