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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d3d9b51 | Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| c597290 | We must distinguish between 'sentimental' and 'sensitive'. A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mo.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| d81f1ae | The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in r.. | poet poetry | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 9d850b7 | I could not kill , of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. | lolita love love-at-first-sight love-at-last-sight love-you-forever vladimir-nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 0f73666 | We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures -- when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 4eb0978 | We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open | fierceness love obsession passion passionate passionate-love self-destructive young-love | Vladimir Nabokov | |
| 4f20096 | Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 801775b | I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 60a0eeb | Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others, | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 5f7bfd1 | It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 204a324 | I will miss her dearly, and I hope that she is up in heaven right now watching us and smiling, even though deep down I know that if there is an afterlife, she's a pretty much open-and-shut case for hell. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 1365cce | Asking your friend to be a bridesmaid is one of the modern paradoxes: no one actually wants to do it, but everyone would be offended if you didn't ask. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| ac58458 | How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! | Nathaniel Hawthorne | ||
| 37554e5 | In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. | Nathaniel Hawthorne | ||
| e5dd8ef | Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. | sewing women | Nathaniel Hawthorne | |
| 2733fc1 | you love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered. | love sons-and-lovers | D.H. Lawrence | |
| 0f785a9 | You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, You are the night, and I the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete. You and I, What more--? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this! | d-h-lawrence look-we-have-come-through night-and-day perfect strange suffering whole you-and-i | D.H. Lawrence | |
| 77996c3 | He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably. | Richard Russo | ||
| 3e2923d | I've always known that there's more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn't regret that he isn't more fully understood? | Richard Russo | ||
| 08c9b1a | The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds. | Richard Russo | ||
| d7c8b6f | Most things don't stay the way they are very long. | Richard Ford | ||
| e20472d | Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling a.. | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 3eeeea0 | Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say "girl"? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you're a saint or you're psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If you're often offended by things, you're probably a self-righteous asshole and it's too bad you weren't censored yourself--by your mother in an abortion clinic." | William T. Vollmann | ||
| 196c982 | If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469" | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 8bc52ce | Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap. | Norman Mailer | ||
| e637fd7 | No heart is so hard as the timid heart. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 033fa7c | I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind | Norman Mailer | ||
| d889897 | And were your back as broad as heaven, and your purse full of gold, and did your compassion reach from here to hell itself, there is nothing you can do. | Alan Paton | ||
| f612713 | For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born. | Alan Paton | ||
| 8bd818b | You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 4c676fe | In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim. You promised not to do that, the boy said. What? You know what, Papa. He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back. I have to watch you all the time, the boy said. | generosity love sacrifice selflessness | Cormac McCarthy | |
| c8786c5 | If he is not the word of God God never spoke. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| cf30b38 | Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here. | existentialism realist | Cormac McCarthy | |
| c9c66f1 | If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altoget.. | fate predestination prophecy sorcery | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 5cc9959 | The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have kn.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e6fa9fb | I dont think you havin a bad day, Professor. I think you havin a bad life. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 752f6eb | You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course. | Anne Lamott | ||
| ae9b882 | Fox: It's lonely at the top. Gould: But it ain't crowded. | David Mamet | ||
| 4f276e4 | Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he do.. | real_life tragedy | David Mamet | |
| 89192d9 | You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 89a0248 | Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 75d5d66 | Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. | imagination writing writing-life | Annie Dillard | |
| 90ce133 | Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water." | metaphor science sea-lion snail systems-analyst water | Annie Dillard | |
| 36d797e | Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and .. | reading understanding writing writing-life | Annie Dillard |