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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e8d5649 | There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 0add466 | Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ea79640 | Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle. | paradise reading | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 633df55 | It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism--all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess? | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 70c7044 | that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born... | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 83b179e | Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4174b54 | The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. | nature | Joseph Conrad | |
| c1aeb7b | In the Shakespearean comedies, the wedding is the end, and there isn't much indication of what happily ever after will look like day to day. In real life, shouldn't a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends? A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can't wait to talk about gardening with for the next forty y.. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 09c117d | That's the one nice thing about being a dork about men: you can sometimes play it off as restrained and classy. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 37a9a10 | Playful arguments would become fits of uncontrollable laughter, and, like magic, that experience would be crystallized into a private joke, and the private joke would get boiled down to a simple phrase, which became a souvenir of the entire experience. For years to come, the phrase alone could uncork hours of renewed laughter. And as everyone knows, the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| c242d4a | Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,--call it which you will,--is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one | Nathaniel Hawthorne | ||
| 53d9175 | Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. | Nathaniel Hawthorne | ||
| 9743c5b | Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose. | home meditation zen | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 58c886a | The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 09ba6ed | Live. For Now. For the time being. | live time wisdom | Ruth Ozeki | |
| f3644d3 | They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving, | Richard Russo | ||
| a7ed82b | In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise. | Richard Russo | ||
| d587b2d | He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to. | fathers sons | Richard Ford | |
| 0f32822 | I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what i believe. I cannot unlive my life | Hilary Mantel | ||
| a01a792 | He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?" | fathers-and-sons | Hilary Mantel | |
| 642d641 | Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited? Norman Spinrad: I think it's a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov's, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn't. The supposed dichotomy between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction" is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgera.. | Norman Spinrad | ||
| 1940bc1 | I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it. I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating. | cry-the-beloved-country | Alan Paton | |
| 26ef76e | It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it. | Alan Paton | ||
| 543f89c | Because that was what we all did--we searched for labels for people until we found one we thought might fit, and then we sighed in relief that we had placed them. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 86b427c | But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 9e8717b | See the child. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4caab1c | His subtle obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4b78377 | It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too. | perspective | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 4791c2d | Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| d6c16ec | She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| bd659b5 | He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 81f7da1 | The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now. | existentialism realist | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 96344db | All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 517cc63 | I reckon if I can't spend the day sleeping, the next best thing is to spend it reading and drinking. | Pete McCarthy | ||
| aa55ef0 | When you open a book," the sentimental library posters said, "anything can happen." This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone's way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them hea.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 456ee16 | In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our lif.. | life love science sea unity | Annie Dillard | |
| d68dda3 | it speaks of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you're doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss. | Anne Lamott | ||
| e151b0c | It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 9c1d80c | Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger. | Mary Roach | ||
| 26b617f | You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| f3c8f24 | Good God, Clarence! You look like a bereaved tapeworm. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| a27bc11 | You agreee with me that the situation is a lulu? Certainly, a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, Sir. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 5fa7c3e | There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paper-weight. The number of its pages assures its posessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation. Place upon the waistline and jerked up and down each morning, it will reduce embonpoint and strengthen the abdominal muscles. And those still at their pu.. | usefulness | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| b3f335a | Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess." - Ch. 5" | Amy Tan |