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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b7e2811 | She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? | Ian McEwan | ||
| f9ad1d3 | Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no. | confidence wisdom | Ian McEwan | |
| f9751f3 | Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which .. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 6117607 | We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 05969a6 | When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. | love marriage memory truth | Ian McEwan | |
| c5b7aa8 | Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. | waiting | Ian McEwan | |
| a013b60 | There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of .. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 547ab68 | We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, 'foreplay'. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phra.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 5a7a601 | She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 6f933b2 | It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy | Ian McEwan | ||
| b82d132 | Non badavo granche a tematiche o felicita di stile, e saltavo le descrizioni minute di tempo atmosferico, paesaggi e interni. Volevo personaggi in cui potessi credere, e volevo provare curiosita per cio che avrebbero vissuto. [...] Romanzi a sensazione, alta letteratura e tutto cio che stava nel mezzo: a ognuno riservavo lo stesso rude trattamento. | quotes | Ian McEwan | |
| 44e43f9 | Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 66212f4 | He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 0e1b534 | His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 398b153 | But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least duri.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 2db5267 | No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process. | Ian McEwan | ||
| db4920e | Deceptions are more frequent than changes | Franz Kafka | ||
| 566c876 | What am I doing in this eternal winter? | franz-kafka | Franz Kafka | |
| 44ac934 | If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o'clock. | Franz Kafka | ||
| b93f388 | The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter;.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 33a153e | If you haven't heard him...man, it's like he boiled down down all the melancholy in the world, all the bruises and all the fucked-up dreams you've let go, and poured the essence into a little tiny bottle and corked it up. | Nick Hornby | ||
| d2a3b09 | That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself. | irony life mothers people | Nick Hornby | |
| f765d88 | There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. | love lucky nick-hornby people | Nick Hornby | |
| 6aa321e | Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad"." | Nick Hornby | ||
| e6a5963 | You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad. | Nick Hornby | ||
| ee335ff | He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 615fa56 | fkWr twms: n mDj`@ mr'@ wlnwm m`h rGbtn lyst mkhtlftyn fHsb bl mtnqDtn 'yDan. flHb l ytjl~ blrGb@ fy mmrs@ ljns (whdhh lrGb@ tnTbq `l~ jml@ l tHS~ mn lns) wlkn blrGb@ fy lnwm lmshtrk (whdhh lrGb@ l tkhSW l mr'@ wHd@). | علم-نفس فلسفة فلسفة-حياة friedrich-nietzche friedrich-nietzsche حب جنس اجتماع كائن-لا-تحتمل-خفته love milan-kundera ميلان-كونديرا neitzsche novel نيتشه philosophy philosophy-of-life political psychological psychology religion religion-and-philoshophy sex sociology | ميلان كونديرا | |
| eb4df89 | What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence? | Milan Kundera | ||
| 7012835 | She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strength | Milan Kundera | ||
| 552658b | The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 64c4b3c | The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. | history | Milan Kundera | |
| cdac377 | History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow. | lightness | Milan Kundera | |
| 4dc57f7 | Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls? | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 34895db | Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 80e79dc | She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the.. | interpreter-of-maladies jhumpa-lahiri this-blessed-house | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 015b5b7 | So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all." -"Wow," I said. "Did the search pay off?" "That's the hard part," said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. "I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it .. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 3265a69 | She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 6d6f893 | But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't ave a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 7e51c25 | I'm struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| cd68fd9 | I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching TV dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and exhaust fans. One teenaged boy was practicing a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expressi.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| b53c2c0 | What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 1db623f | To think that each skull once had skin and flesh and was stuffed with gray matter--in varying quantities--teeming with thoughts of food and sex and dominance. All now vanished. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| b0fa0ec | nkt: mn l'fDl 'l 'Hwl l`thwr `l~ lmnTq | Haruki Murakami | ||
| adcdaac | The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes. | fit places | Haruki Murakami |