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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eaa684f | They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 68a64d4 | that grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 6a84f93 | What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there ain't no such thing. | seeking spirit strive | Anne Lamott | |
| 082e3c1 | You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags. | Anne Lamott | ||
| cf8ecc8 | All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think th.. | writing-craft writing-life writing-process | Anne Lamott | |
| b0ab300 | Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between. | Mary Roach | ||
| b2df7f5 | Mr Wisdom,' said the girl who had led him into the presence. 'Ah,' said Howard Saxby, and there was a pause of perhaps three minutes, during which his needles clicked busily. 'Wisdom, did she say?' 'Yes. I wrote "Cocktail Time"' 'You couldn't have done better,' said Mr Saxby cordially. 'How's your wife, Mr Wisdom?' Cosmo said he had no wife. 'Surely?' "I'm a bachelor.' Then Wordsworth was wrong. He said you were married to immortal verse. E.. | humour knitting publisher tennyson wordsworth | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 0fa286b | The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| a27c16e | While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth. | Amy Tan | ||
| 49b4df8 | It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable...What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness? "So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allo.. | Amy Tan | ||
| fa31e78 | American circumstances and Chiese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your .. | Amy Tan | ||
| 371d665 | You've got some 'Star-Spangled' nails in your coffin, kid. That's what | Richard Brautigan | ||
| 20a39f7 | A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the main street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin, and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday. | Richard Brautigan | ||
| da20dc9 | I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. | reading | Anne Fadiman | |
| 2f5f4d6 | Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself. | view-point | Anne Fadiman | |
| c19ffe5 | You can miss a lot by sticking to the point. | Anne Fadiman | ||
| a8c21e9 | If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| e53f9d5 | As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized ... | Noam Chomsky | ||
| 75742c9 | What does it mean to be truly educated? I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very pl.. | Noam Chomsky | ||
| 33db4f9 | It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 1b41aed | Through my own efforts, I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 0777891 | There's been something nagging at me all day. As long as I'm here with him, I might as well ask. "Did we kiss last night?" "Yes." "Well, it wasn't memorable because I have no recollection of it." He laughs. "I was kiddin'. We didn't kiss." He leans in. "When we kiss you'll remember it. Forever." | Simone Elkeles | ||
| 7b2fdb8 | I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally .. | caleb reality self-awareness-honesty-self | Simone Elkeles | |
| 974b1e6 | For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possib.. | John Berendt | ||
| 60e1826 | To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 7a206ff | There are lots of things a warrior can do at a certain time which he couldn't do years before. Those things themselves did not change; what changed was his idea of himself. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 6e7c547 | I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke. | paradox | John Barth | |
| 29eb1a2 | an urge, a need, a passionate yearning to share the warmth with the one person left for him to love. | Lois Lowry | ||
| 0d49a00 | if you are going to be pushed you had better jump | Henry James | ||
| 5870c7c | Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there! | human life monkeys | Henry James | |
| 8fcf997 | You are good for nothing unless you are clever. | Henry James | ||
| 0d6467b | He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far le.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| b397d22 | The child was left alone to die in the hallway. Here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with Peter. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and.. | Mark Helprin | ||
| 6a07491 | What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences. | disappearance intelligence language narrative | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| a873b46 | The mind creates those things that exist. | mind | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| 8f292f8 | the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair. | listening silence transformation | Terry Tempest Williams | |
| 9151010 | Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of southern Uta.. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| 641b97d | I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have .. | Terry Tempest Williams | ||
| ea72fb5 | Alice had begun with 'Let's pretend we're kings and queens;' and her sister, who liked being exact, had argued that they couldn't, because there were only two of them, and Alice hand been reduced at last to say, 'Well, you can be one of them then, and I'll be the rest. | Lewis Carroll | ||
| 33fa462 | simply--"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise." | Lewis Carroll | ||
| aea611f | O Oysters,' said the Carpenter, You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?' But answer came there none - | Lewis Carroll | ||
| bd24ae7 | Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrodinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. | Daniel H. Pink | ||
| 7f7b691 | Above them, one of the blackened television screens brightens, and there's an announcement about the in-flight movie. It's an animated film about a family of ducks, one that Hadley's actually see, and when Oliver groans, shes about to deny the whole thing. But then she twists around in her seat and eyes him critically. "There's nothing wrong with ducks," she tells him, and he rolls his eyes. "Talking ducks?" Hadley grins. "They sing, too." .. | Jennifer E. Smith | ||
| 8121532 | She felt a little nervous about this; 'for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, 'in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing. | Lewis Carroll |