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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bddfea6 | But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still - very wonderful things have happened! | George Eliot | ||
| fdefa29 | We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering. | George Eliot | ||
| 739590a | Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder. | jealousy neighborhood | George Eliot | |
| 17595cd | How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts? | pride self-centeredness | George Eliot | |
| 0681291 | Puritanism has made life itself impossible. More than art, more than estheticism, life represents beauty in a thousand variations; it is indeed, a gigantic panorama of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed and immovable conception of life; it is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natu.. | puritanism | Emma Goldman | |
| c15afe9 | for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. | George Eliot | ||
| b8920c4 | When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures. | feelings value | George Eliot | |
| 9b015a4 | I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me. | George Eliot | ||
| 93c2f88 | and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 70e168b | Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 19d62a6 | We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these - 'Chloe liked Olivia ...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. 'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And.. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 508c980 | I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 1e9e391 | Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her ar.. | intimacy knowledge love women | Virginia Woolf | |
| 7046b16 | children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-- to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to be.. | solitude | Virginia Woolf | |
| e7cfac7 | so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such ki.. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 1a76efe | But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 576d42c | I want to resemble a sort of liquid light which stretches beyond visibility or invisibility. Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 82305e4 | To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| eac90aa | What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever. | reading | Virginia Woolf | |
| 0fed880 | No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willo.. | women | Virginia Woolf | |
| 0a72756 | Theodore Finch leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like he has all the time in the world and he expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: "Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here." | Jennifer Niven | ||
| b468977 | April 43rd 2000 Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash. | insanity madness sad | Nikolai Gogol | |
| 6a4bd86 | Since when," he asked, | beginnings-and-endings endings poetry | Seamus Heaney | |
| 7e5f123 | It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. | Seamus Heaney | ||
| bb74500 | The worst thing about talk ... is that there's no way to lay it to rest. Every fresh breeze brings a new speculation. | truth | Susan Wittig Albert | |
| 4e943cd | To a lover of books the shops and sales in London present irresistible temptations. | book-stores books london reading | Edward Gibbon | |
| 664a44a | Anna, falling in love with you was like coming home to a place I didn't realize I'd been missing all my life. You're the only person I've ever known who accepts me for who I am, right in this moment, faults and all, and isn't waiting for me to become someone else. | marriage | Jennifer Chiaverini | |
| b182932 | If you're going to live your life based on delusions (and you are, because we all do), then why not at least select a delusion that is helpful? | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| ee737f2 | Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 2908d85 | When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 3d7c043 | People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything you're holding back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 59d43ba | Desperate love is always the toughest way to do it. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 4dc5958 | In the end, I've come to believe in something I call the 'physics of the quest', a force in nature governed by the laws of gravity. The rules of quest physics goes something like this: If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting and set out on a truth seeking journey either internally or externally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept.. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 192bc38 | I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest. | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 9c2eb5f | Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch? | Elizabeth Gilbert | ||
| 4458d06 | The life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand. | Arthur Schopenhauer | ||
| 8b1e81d | As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. | Arthur Schopenhauer | ||
| e9f8dc2 | Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat. | opinions other-people ourselves self-worth | Arthur Schopenhauer | |
| 3c66e4f | People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The | Irvin D. Yalom | ||
| 707fd2f | He who would be everything cannot be anything.")" | Irvin D. Yalom | ||
| 762367f | The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines. | orthodoxy | Irvin D. Yalom | |
| bacc260 | The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one's own parent or remains the eternal child. | Irvin D. Yalom | ||
| 787dc4c | But I must admit I didn't like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let's turn on the gas at once. And you don't turn it on. | Simone de Beauvoir | ||
| 1a34f1d | Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. | war | Simone de Beauvoir |