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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e02a415 | Remember to act always as if you were at a symposium. When the food or drink comes around, reach out and take some politely; if it passes you by don't try pulling it back. And if it has not reached you yet, don't let your desire run ahead of you, be patient until your turn comes. Adopt a similar attitude with regard to children, wife, wealth and status, and in time, you will be entitled to dine with the gods. Go further and decline these go.. | self-control stoic stoicism | Epictetus | |
| abb4e54 | As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else. | need want | Jeannette Walls | |
| 5edf764 | The end-of-summer winds make people restless. | summer | Sebastian Faulks | |
| c59cd09 | I've also learned that you don't always get to pick the people with whom you travel the journey. You sometimes may think you do, but don't be deceived. And the corollary of that - and this was my real lesson - is that you start to realize that you can love even the people you don't like and must love and help everyone. | Lama Surya Das | ||
| f9b43b0 | We are broken open, or we willfully shed. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 1704a43 | He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar. "All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me." "Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her. "You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surpr.. | sex women | Joseph Heller | |
| f550bf1 | Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 8e12501 | A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 164fed3 | You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 88bc3e3 | Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can'.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 752953e | Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. | ian-malcolm jurassic-park science | Michael Crichton | |
| d91773b | You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don't have the right to abandon him just because he's inconvenient or has trouble in school. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 0558f27 | It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me | loneliness tragedy | Jean Anouilh | |
| fa8fff4 | W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, t.. | Judith Butler | ||
| 167024b | Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole of mankind was divided into two teams -- Sala's Boys, and The Others. The stakes were fantastic and every play was vital -- and although he watched with a nearly obsessive interest, he was very much t.. | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| 8aa4fe6 | Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation--all expenses paid--wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that's where he went. Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb? | democracy salt-lake-city utah voting | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| 51d764c | The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid impotent fear. (In a letter dated 9-26-58) | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| ee6a36b | There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency. | philosophy | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| c81ef65 | There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks | Toni Morrison | ||
| c4de1ee | Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it,.. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 3653139 | Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. | Toni Morrison | ||
| f85d7ca | Her passions were narrow but deep. | dreams passion passions | Toni Morrison | |
| 71ef0e7 | All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 90410b1 | When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| df83f49 | He stopped and glared at her. "It's a lifetime commitment in my book, lady. It's not an arrangement you nullify when things get a little tough to bear." | Francine Rivers | ||
| f22aada | I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself. | suicide | Raymond Carver | |
| dd54b77 | We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up. | gazebo life | Raymond Carver | |
| 46145fc | Well, sometime Mr ---- git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr ---- head open, she say. Think bout heaven later. | Alice Walker | ||
| cccfd6a | But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain | Alice Walker | ||
| 527f719 | I love his dear eyes in which the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can be plainly read. | Alice Walker | ||
| abbea64 | She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her. It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, a.. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 167f558 | The future is what matters -- because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present -- like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot. | future | Sylvia Plath | |
| 03abd4a | Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 8edb34a | The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven -- and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive -- nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking. | death human-mind | Sylvia Plath | |
| adb855f | I self-paralyze myself & wonder what I've got in my head. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| c964aea | She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin. | John Cheever | ||
| dd3c98f | 'yn l'rwH lmtshbh@ (lmtnskh@) lt~ 'stTy` ltHdth m`h? 'yn lbld lt~ 'jd fyh lHlm ldh~ tHdth l~ qlb~? 'yn hw'l ldhyn qrw lktb 'yDan? | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 7ff98c9 | The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in the paradise where happy mares and stallion live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 72e4e48 | It desolates me to disappoint you, but your brother is not here. Despite two really praiseworthy attempts at rescue." ... The hint of amusement irritated me, and sick and hurt as I was, I simply had to retort thing. "Glad... at least... you're desolated." | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 73193a6 | Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need. - Why is that? - What's that, Marshal? - The full moon. You think it makes people crazy? - I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out. - How come? - Well, you think about it--the moon affects the tide, right? - Sure. - Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water. - I'll buy that. - Huma.. | sanity | Dennis Lehane | |
| 066621e | You're on your own now. You are not helpless. You will find your way. | Robert Ludlum | ||
| 822bb71 | If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine. And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| fc68365 | Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| db7c04c | If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal. | Orson Scott Card |