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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f2e0593 | In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman. | empowerment feminism gender history independence inequality marriage married-life matrimony men misogyny perception self-abnegation self-determination social-norms subjugation wedlock women women-s-rights | Antonia Fraser | |
| ed95cbf | The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 0fcdc77 | Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| d128667 | That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution | life suffering | Haruki Murakami | |
| e37437d | Do you think music has the power to change people? Like you listen to a piece and go through some major change inside?" Oshima nodded."Sure, that can happen. We have an experience--like a chemical reaction--that transforms something inside us. When we examine ourselves later on, we discover that all the standards we've lived by have shot up another notch and the world's opened up in unexpected ways. Yes, I've had that experience. Not often.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 9ce37e0 | Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. | morality post-modern | Haruki Murakami | |
| a475ad7 | Being tough isn't in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn't try to understand those less fortunate. Too used to being healthy, and didn't try to understand the pain of those who weren't. Whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralyzed by events, I decided it was entirely his fault-.. | fortunate healthy strong tough understanding weak | Haruki Murakami | |
| 8ed43a9 | People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed? | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5527681 | However miserable your situation, there is always something to learn. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| f42501a | Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used. To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along. Not that the spiders had any awareness of being "patient". A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shri.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| ba1700c | I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. And killing time is one of my specialities. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d00fd96 | Ideas are like beards. Men don't have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can't remember who." "Voltaire," the younger man said. He rubbed his chin and smiled, a cheerful, unaffected smile. "Voltaire might be off the mark, though, when it comes to me. I have hardly any beard at all, but have loved thinking about things since I was a kid." His face was indeed smooth, with no hint of a beard. His eyebrows were narrow, but thick.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5ef2842 | Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 2454730 | I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first. ...I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thi.. | criminal | Haruki Murakami | |
| 3c9c323 | All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 324a757 | And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| a460abd | Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 7fb797c | He wasn't so bad when the two of us came to see you, though. He was just his usual self." Because you were there," said Naoko. "He was always like that around you. He struggled to keep his weaknesses hidden. I'm sure he was very fond of you. He made a point of letting you see only his best side. He wasn't like that with me. He'd let his guard down. He could be really moody. One minute he'd be chattering away, and the next thing he'd be depr.. | norwegian-wood | Haruki Murakami | |
| 3f51637 | I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 18d9ca9 | Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. This was Dr. Tokai's personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said about the kind of lies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things, too, but they also don't hesitate to lie about the most important .. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| ace0f50 | Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life---and for me, for writing as well. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5db4943 | Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That's how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 3037bd5 | Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 63786cc | Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| dab8610 | I'll never find out now What A. thought of me. If B. ever forgave me in the end. Why C. pretended everything was fine. What part D. played in E.'s silence. What F. had been expecting, if anything. Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well. What H. had to hide. What I. wanted to add. If my being around | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| 426fedc | Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 6e72f67 | My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one. | Laurie R. King | ||
| b1dbcca | Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes t.. | Laurie R. King | ||
| 70e34d6 | I wanted so much to step over and pick them up. Several times I tried to move my feet, but they seemed to be nailed to the floor. I knew the pups were mine, all mine, yet I couldn't move. My heart started aching like a drunk grasshopper. I tried to swallow and couldn't. My Adam's apple wouldn't work. One pup started my way. I held my breath. On he came until I felt a scratchy little foot on mine. The other pup followed. A warm puppy tongue .. | Wilson Rawls | ||
| d3480ef | I'd like to take a walk far back in the flinty hills and search for a souvenir, an old double-bitted ax stuck deep in the side of a white oak tree. I know the handle has long since rotted away with time. Perhaps the rusty frame of a coal-oil lantern still hangs there on the blade. | Wilson Rawls | ||
| 218126d | The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it? | secrets | Kim Edwards | |
| f2d59c4 | Upon my word,' said Dantes, 'you make me tremble. If I listen much longer to you, I shall believe the world is filled with tigers and crocodiles.' 'Remember that two-legged tigers and crocodiles are more dangerous than those that walk on four. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| f327b89 | Maybe they notice me wincing whenever I hear them say it, but I don't know: there are all sorts of reasons I could be wincing. Life is a wince-a-thon. | cringe high-school nickname wince | Frank Portman | |
| a16897f | The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| c68df56 | Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent. | celebrity-memoir creativity creativity-and-attitude memoir perseverance talent | Steve Martin | |
| 345b79c | nobody understood that no amount of makeup, fresh air or shopping was going to fill the hole in her heart. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| f7d942b | you don't marry someone you can live with, you marry the person you cannot live without | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| 2afc99d | P.S. I Love You | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| d715b5d | If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| cf1cd10 | Life is everything, and you haven't lived it properly until you believe. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| d8d0d07 | People come and people go and we know this happens, yet we get such a shock when it does. | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| 541c1c2 | Alex: OK, that sounds like a challenge! Well firstly, I would have brought you to a hotel along the coast so that your suite would have the best sea view in the hotel. You could fall asleep listening to the waves crashing against the rocks, I would sprinkle the bed with red rose petals and have candles lit all around the room, I would have your favorite CD playing quietly in the background. But I wouldn't propose to you there. I would bring.. | rosie-and-alex | Cecelia Ahern | |
| fedf547 | I can't even think about what life "could have been" like in Boston, without crying. It's like deja-vu, I don't think me and Boston were ever meant to be." | Cecelia Ahern | ||
| f3e5904 | You keep distracting me," I tell her. "All I'm doing is sitting here talking to you!" "Exactly," I say, and I smile at her.j" | distraction humor love oliver | Jodi Picoult |