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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1dee257 | If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love | love think | C.G. Jung | |
| 29a8c11 | There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 5afdcc7 | Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his. | Jonathan Lethem | ||
| 665b568 | Things have changed, of course. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing. | Alice Munro | ||
| d4798c3 | I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. | Alice Munro | ||
| b5e71ea | The law may upset reason but reason may never upset the law, or our whole society will shred like an old tatami. The law may be used to confound reason, reason must certainly not be used to overthrow the law. | James Clavell | ||
| 610d2b0 | it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself. | Curtis Sittenfeld | ||
| 7ad0299 | I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| f5d7a0f | Dear Anna, we will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| e08c8c0 | How did her life live itself without her. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 26d1b9a | Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 4d1d21a | There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote , and also , which are both premium books. | humor | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| fc0f3d1 | That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it? | Denis Johnson | ||
| 13833aa | Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?" "No wonder they call me Fuckhead." It's a name that's going to stick. " | Denis Johnson | ||
| 650fa34 | I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave. | Denis Johnson | ||
| e58e9d0 | I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote. | Ian McEwan | ||
| b9616a6 | He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-p.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 1d7d60f | He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse. | robbie | Ian McEwan | |
| ab4a762 | Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 9a444ad | Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes. | Ian McEwan | ||
| f5463c3 | Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction? | Ian McEwan | ||
| 2db0f6c | How do you feel?' Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.' But you don't look it.' I feel I'm shivering inside. | Ian McEwan | ||
| dab1c76 | Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia's thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse? | Ian McEwan | ||
| 3be8802 | Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense. | Ian McEwan | ||
| e1dd9e0 | My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 71a77d8 | Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 934f1d3 | The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn't say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don't know you very well, are likely to think you're rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 6159537 | W]riting stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages....The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically empathic sentence, falling in love would be achieved in a single word--a . | Ian McEwan | ||
| eaec01c | There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 1db6a44 | But I cannot find my way in this darkness," said K. "Turn left to the wall," said the priest, "then follow the wall without leaving it and you'll come to a door." The priest had already taken a step or two away from him, but K. cried out in a loud voice, "please wait a moment." "I am waiting," said the priest. "Don't you want anything more form me?" asked K. "No," said the priest. "You were so friendly to me for a time," said K., "and expla.. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 76dedef | nh lmm yw'lm Gy@ l'lm 'n yuHkm lmru bnan `l~ qwnyn l y`rfh | Franz Kafka | ||
| b77f6cc | I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face. | Franz Kafka | ||
| cf3482a | nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him." | Milan Kundera | ||
| b3f9477 | At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border? | Milan Kundera | ||
| fd06343 | The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0c96757 | Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0255671 | Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. | Milan Kundera | ||
| e8532b7 | The man raised his glass, 'To you!' Can't you think of a wittier toast?' Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl's game. Now sitting face to face with her, he realized it wasn't just the which were turning her into a stranger, but that her had changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled that type of woman whom he knew so well and for whom he felt some ave.. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 15f7b37 | about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey." -- | home libraries organization | Nick Hornby | |
| 5116e45 | Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. | sport | Nick Hornby | |
| 42af075 | He was now beginning to wonder whether the jigsaw was the correct metaphor for relationships between me and women after all. It didn't take account of the sheer stubbornness of human beings, their determination to affix themselves to another even if they didn't fit. They didn't care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn't care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, .. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 9d43544 | Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destro.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 383159d | Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the.. | effort friendship hornby | Nick Hornby | |
| e3c808c | Freunde mussen einander verstehen um Freunde zu bleiben. Bruder sind immer Bruder. | Max Frisch |