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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c1eb8f6 | What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. | life listening nature | Annie Dillard | |
| 8190f7f | Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right. | innocence writing | Anne Lamott | |
| a10cd03 | Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 3c6836e | Anne Lamott's priest friend Tom, how to get through: | Anne Lamott | ||
| 614c4a9 | For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return. | Anne Lamott | ||
| edc4038 | But what if the great secret insider-trading truth is that you don't ever get over the biggest losses in your life? Is that good news, bad news, or both? . . . . The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to. Pretending that things are nicely boxed.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| b67317c | I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. | humour jeeves jeeves-and-wooster wodehouse wooster writing writing-craft | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 9d93887 | Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 15cfde9 | Talking of being eaten by dogs, there's a dachshund at Brinkley who when you first meet him will give you the impression that he plans to convert you into a light snack between his regular meals. Pay no attention. It's all eyewash. His belligerent attitude is simply--" Sound and fury signifying nothing, sir?" That's it. Pure swank. A few civil words, and he will be grappling you . . . What's the expression I've heard you use?" Grappling me .. | P. G. Wodehouse | ||
| 1a27e43 | As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven't got an.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 241b348 | There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart. | mouse | Richard Brautigan | |
| 22c0bd3 | She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams. | Eudora Welty | ||
| d8ab8b2 | The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily--perhaps not possibly--chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation. | Eudora Welty | ||
| 43bcb91 | To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism -- group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state wit.. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| 21c3379 | Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, "It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 2b112f3 | Fuck you," Alex growls. He shoves back his chair and walks away. "That's the old Alex I used to know! I understand that language loud and clear," I call after him." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 0c04b9f | You're so critical. Oh, God, I'd do anything for you to stop blaming me for every little thing that goes wrong. Love me for who I am. Love Shelley for who she is. Stop focusing on the bad stuff because life is just too damn short. | perfect-chemistry | Simone Elkeles | |
| 2a6ec8f | I'll explain it to you. To me it's more than a game." She touches her chest and says, "When you love something as much as I love football, you just feel it inside. Did you ever love doing something so bad that it consumed you?" "A long time ago." "That's what football is to me. It's my passion, my life... my escape. When I play, I forget everything that sucks in my life. And when we win..." She looks down like she's embarrassed to admit w.. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 3c1821e | The end of one thing is just the beginning of another. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 4962fbc | Unfortunately, there are no guarentees in life. | Simone Elkeles | ||
| b6485cd | A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 289d4f5 | Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 4b25ca5 | But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 2d92aa7 | You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 75b2952 | I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 1af9318 | Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 20d02bd | He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?" The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of d.. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| c1b1d41 | Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| ce9ecd6 | The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls. | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 7cf9a94 | The process of revision should be constant and endless | Salman Rushdie | ||
| ef84b50 | All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate. | John Barth | ||
| 6ef7ccf | He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul. | marriage melancholy | Horace Walpole | |
| 5f43953 | These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there's son against father: the king falls from bias of na.. | William Shakespeare | ||
| e5233c5 | Say she rail; why, I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly wash'd with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word; Then I'll commend her volubility, and say she uttereth piercing eloquence. | William Shakespeare | ||
| ea33b7c | Fool: "He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." King Lear (III, vi, 19-21)" | whore-s-oath wolves | William Shakespeare | |
| 091f11d | In such business | William Shakespeare | ||
| 986f2f7 | I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano! | melancholy | William Shakespeare | |
| fe5c423 | No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself, But by reflection, by some other things. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 6ea5826 | When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets.. | clock shakespeare sonnet time | William Shakespeare | |
| 5fc6928 | For this relief much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 6f591ac | We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too-- Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out-- And take upon 's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies. | William Shakespeare | ||
| c69914f | Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either master the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency. | priorities self-control self-improvement uprightness | William Shakespeare | |
| 25cf15f | To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come? | William Shakespeare | ||
| 53e00ea | As merry as the day is long. | William Shakespeare |