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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5ffde6d | People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them. | music poetry science | Ludwig Wittgenstein | |
| 26a459d | Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| 7793104 | The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| 6475503 | The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good....These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice--how we relate to one another. For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to becom.. | Sue Monk Kidd | ||
| f7e226f | When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing. | Harold Pinter | ||
| a98a226 | You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 22391c3 | that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 46fe7ba | The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. | morality mortality | vladimir nabokov | |
| f6c8e5d | Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c00a796 | Do those clowns really believe what they teach? | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 7d05a43 | Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 390fcc5 | He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 838f284 | I'm the one who looks at the infant, smiles nervously, and as my contribution to small talk, robotically announces to the parent, "Your child looks healthy and well cared for." | Mindy Kaling | ||
| ce49de9 | How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things. | D.H. Lawrence | ||
| 3dbcd96 | I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld. | D.H. Lawrence | ||
| cdc1eb6 | What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. | desire lady-chatterley-s-lover poets sentiment sex | D.H. Lawrence | |
| ec1c6f1 | Doesn't everyone sell his soul? I tell you, sir: the devil does not exist, there is no devil, yet I sold him my soul. That is what I am afraid of. To whom did I sell it? That is what I am afraid of, my dear sir: we sell our souls, only there is no buyer. | selling-your-soul | João Guimarães Rosa | |
| 9d57338 | When I run out of the things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 1e72506 | Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing." "That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?" Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave." | ocean wave | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 5d40ddd | As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 0848d51 | Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evi.. | humor | Richard Russo | |
| df89c9b | To expect reason is where the fallacy lies. | Richard Russo | ||
| 7f946e9 | You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4cff7df | He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d118bde | A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 92aeae9 | He never sees More - a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod - without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month th.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d999d41 | The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitou.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 7e8ce6e | Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 72f3e1c | This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think? | perspective | Cormac McCarthy | |
| ee03450 | The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b53db82 | the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. Allen | Jack Kerouac | ||
| e0f4f97 | Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid? | Annie Dillard | ||
| 05e63be | We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping live.. | writing | Annie Dillard | |
| f072b33 | I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains | Annie Dillard | ||
| e94ac0d | It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart. | spirituality | Anne Lamott | |
| bbbb22a | I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All .. | reverence writing-advice | Anne Lamott | |
| 8740c29 | Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulge.. | anne-lamott bird-by-bird first-draft first-drafts write writer writers writing writing-advice writing-life | Anne Lamott | |
| 7e65efe | Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 82347e8 | Half a league Half a league Half a league onward | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 05feb21 | We must always remember, however,' said Psmith gravely, 'that poets are also God's creatures. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6596efe | Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 8444416 | So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life. | mystery | Amy Tan | |
| 731ce45 | Dementia was like a truth serum. | truth | Amy Tan | |
| 4be72e3 | For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me... All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me... We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing; unheard and not hearing, unknown by others. | Amy Tan |