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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b45eecc | Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matte.. | nature trees | Truman Capote | |
| 3b69f49 | She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so. | fashion groomed luster | Truman Capote | |
| d772b52 | She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly. | Truman Capote | ||
| 636b8ba | Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete | innovation | Steven Johnson | |
| a11f6c7 | It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now | Edith Wharton | ||
| c007620 | Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven. | Edith Wharton | ||
| fa61449 | He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. | lily-bart seldon | Edith Wharton | |
| 3c11a8d | True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 755c148 | and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 33928a3 | Mc Donalds he thought. There's no longer any such thing as a Mc Donalds hamburger. He passed out. When he came around seconds later he found he was sobbing for his mother. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 041cfa7 | You ARE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' 'Yeah,' said Zaphod, 'but don't shout it out or they'll all want one.' 'THE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' 'No, just A Zaphod Beeblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six packs?' | Douglas Adams | ||
| 82b79c1 | Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shouted at each other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent months locked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking into the light. Couples walking along the bank got so excited about the general wonderfulness of it all that they had to pop inside for an hour. | Douglas Adams | ||
| b53de5f | Wow,' said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn't much else he could say. He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press. 'Wow.' The crowd turned their faces back toward him expectantly. He winked at Trillian, who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes at him. She knew what he was about to say and thought him a terrible show-off. 'That is really amazing.' he said. 'That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingl.. | Douglas Adams | ||
| d70078b | The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. This is, many would say, impossible. In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on eat) .. | Douglas Adams | ||
| a288afc | These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. | Douglas Adams | ||
| c6d2edd | But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods. | humanity | Douglas Adams | |
| cd763a4 | For the trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are; and they put on the pride and beauty that we would fain wear ourselves. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| d60df0c | The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist," nor "fugitive." In its fairy-tale--or otherworld--setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the e.. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 395b6c1 | Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,' he said slowly, 'likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| ad56280 | The Recovered Thing is not quite the same as the Thing-never-lost. It is often more precious. As Grace, recovered by repentance, is not the same as primitive Innocence, but is not necessarily a poorer or worse state. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 21eda5c | It is plain that we were meant to go together. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| b1711bf | It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 7418cfc | What did I tell you, Mr. Pippin?' said Sam, sheathing his sword. 'Wolves won't get him. That was an eye-opener, and no mistake! Nearly singed the hair off my head! | sam wargs | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| 1a06bb5 | But I spoke hastily. We must not be hasty. I have become too hot. I must cool myself and think; for it is easier to shout than to do it. | inspirational think treebeard | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| c598d33 | Be bold, but wary! Keep up your merry hearts, and ride to meet your fortune! | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| aae0895 | Gandalf put his hand on Pippin's head. "There never was much hope," he answered. "Just a fool's hope, as I have been told." | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 7b3b981 | a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.' Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness. | J.R.R. Tolkien | ||
| 0e983cb | J.R.R.Tolkien has confessed that about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring, some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, and Tolkien was in despair. He didn't know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what to write next. Strider turns out to be no lesser person than Aragorn, the unrecognized and uncrowned king of all the forces of good, whose restoration to rule is, along with the destruction of th.. | character-building fiction-writing lord-of-the-rings motivation plot strider tolkien writing-books | Ansen Dibell | |
| 056c480 | Books ought to have good endings.How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after? | books fellowship-of-the-ring tolkien | J.R.R. Tolkien | |
| 02b78b4 | It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss. | Bryce Courtenay | ||
| 8d9f9c1 | that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. | Herman Melville | ||
| bb31496 | God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates. | Herman Melville | ||
| 7059073 | But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves. Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human. | Herman Melville | ||
| d8d8c3b | the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open... | wonder | Herman Melville | |
| e072eaf | Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. | Herman Melville | ||
| 5803f35 | Politicians in our times feed their cliches to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see.. | reading totalitarianism tyranny | Timothy Snyder | |
| ea5ce88 | Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. | fiction | Ray Bradbury | |
| 3c060e5 | For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is CERTAIN, that nothing bad will ever happen to ME. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there ARE. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag? | Ray Bradbury | ||
| 1fb5971 | Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't giv.. | philosophy | Ray Bradbury | |
| 8e8b374 | We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom. | life-experience writing | Ray Bradbury | |
| f224b73 | Those children are right," he would have said. "They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don't belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago." Oh, thought Mrs. Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr. Bentley--Mr. Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying,.. | Ray Bradbury | ||
| 1926a76 | Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. | life-and-living | Ray Bradbury | |
| e66e3cc | What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!" | writing | Ray Bradbury | |
| 1f35fa2 | I shall remain on Mars and read a book. | reading the-illustrated-man | Ray Bradbury |