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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eed1ce7 | You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying. | Anne Carson | ||
| 2b4d1a5 | All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things? | Anne Carson | ||
| 30c90cc | Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible. | Anne Carson | ||
| fae0e24 | As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless 'Little Match Girl'in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:'Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world! | Jung Chang | ||
| 1a9f19c | Job happiness is directly proportional to the distance you are from the home office. | Nelson DeMille | ||
| 36c3aaf | You have grudged the very fire in your house because the wood cost overmuch!" he cried. "You have grudged life. To live cost overmuch, and you have refused to pay the price. Your life has been like a cabin where the fire is out and there are no blankets on the floor." He signaled to a slave to fill his glass, which he held aloft. "But I have lived. And I have been warm with life as you have never been warm. It is true, you shall live long. .. | fulfillment life reservation | Jack London | |
| a239395 | You entered, Abrupt like "Take it!", Mauling suede gloves, you tarried, And said: "You know,- I'm soon getting married." Get married then. It's all right, I can handle it. You see - I'm calm, of course! Like the pulse Of a corpse. Remember? You used to say: "Jack London, Money, Love and ardour,"-- I saw one thing only: You were La Gioconda, Which had to be stolen! And someone stole you. Again in love, I shall start gambling, With .. | Vladimir Mayakovsky | ||
| fc983d1 | Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly... Irresistible impulses seized him. he would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring on his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours, though the forest aisles. | Jack London | ||
| a320213 | But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space. | Jack London | ||
| 1a33577 | What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something u.. | Barbara Ehrenreich | ||
| 7826566 | When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. | Barbara Ehrenreich | ||
| a14eb31 | Never take advice! | louisa-may-alcott | Louisa May Alcott | |
| 3395a41 | I don't think secrets agree with me, I feel rumpled up in mind since you told me that... | louisa-may-alcott secrets | Louisa May Alcott | |
| 6955462 | One of the sweet things about pain and sorrow is that they show us how well we are loved, how much kindness there is in the world, and how easily we can make others happy in the same way when they need help and sympathy. | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| dadf750 | You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don't move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my.. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 957e895 | Remember you're not alone; you've no right to inflict the sight of your fear on me. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| 19d0988 | We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I.. | liberty society | Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| 998c9d8 | Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse. | feelings insults judgement privacy remorse slander | Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| 604dd4b | There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites--conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it's all the same. | Frank Herbert | ||
| fcc4bbb | Beware of the truth, gentle Sister. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then. | Frank Herbert | ||
| e32c96f | Only fools prefer the past! | Frank Herbert | ||
| fd5ecac | She looked at patches of blackness. Black is a blind remembering, she thought. | Frank Herbert | ||
| d22fc0f | Behold, as a wild ass in the desert, go I forth to my work. | epigram gurney-halleck | Frank Herbert | |
| ba851c1 | Besides, interesting things happen along borders--transitions--not in the middle where everything is the same. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b4c3a45 | If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it. | safety self-reliance | Neal Stephenson | |
| 759537e | He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7b7de19 | We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds. | athleticism brainiac brains bravery breed caveman complexity future gatherer geeks genius hospital humanity hunter hunter-gatherer intelligence intensive-care mastery nerds patients society technology | Neal Stephenson | |
| 381baf4 | A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins. | dicks noir-style women | Raymond Chandler | |
| 438978f | Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 1088198 | f you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| c3ac328 | She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| c3ee515 | Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange? | Michael Cunningham | ||
| e4eca4b | he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 91fa229 | She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8611ea0 | Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver.. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 025b2d7 | What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were ".. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 3cf2ccc | Don't waste your time on life. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 2c81400 | German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 9ba1a6e | Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 96f99d1 | I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others. | libraries social-networking | Doris Kearns Goodwin | |
| 5f2ca57 | Today, in our "shut up, get over it, and move on" mentality, our society misses so much, it's no wonder we are a generation that longs to tell our stories." | Elisabeth Kübler-Ross | ||
| 0fb9a15 | Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism -- anything that will keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love, only to be disappointed but also confirmed as to the rightness of the accusations made. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| d7e6c6c | It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from S.. | snow winter | Truman Capote | |
| e329957 | Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin - deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. | Truman Capote |