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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f5c6cdb | I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f22a36d | In the end, everyone loses everyone. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 589948d | I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ea7f0f0 | What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 28da3e9 | Abraham didn't say, "What do you want?" He didn't say, "Yes?" He answered with a statement: "Here I am." Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| da134c1 | From the movie "Everything is Illuminated" based on a book by Jonathan Safran Foer: I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 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.. | humor work writing | 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 | ||
| 0fd3176 | The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face. 'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 8c7cf2c | However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them. | limitations limits mystery relationships | Ian McEwan | |
| 0d10e27 | She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten. | not-saying silence | Ian McEwan | |
| 5a92043 | When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? | Milan Kundera | ||
| a41fbf6 | Illusions are more common than changes in fortune | Franz Kafka | ||
| 9df62ca | In a way, I was safe writing | way writing | Franz Kafka | |
| 8e9cc3d | Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 16053d9 | Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c1a10de | Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing." | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0c5af50 | I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c5d69aa | Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume to correct attitude to her unchosen faith. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as taking pride in it. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 856373a | In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 3d03058 | Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women? | Milan Kundera | ||
| 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. | drinking forget forgetting love personality poet poetry sex writing | Milan Kundera | |
| 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 |