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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fe181a3 | She destroyed egos by the score and made men hate themselves in the morning by the way she found them, used them, and tossed them aside. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 71edbf1 | People have a right to do anything that's not forbidden by law, and there's no law against lying to you. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 2bc6fff | Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination. | fiction imagination love | Azar Nafisi | |
| 0248b6a | We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| fb33df8 | In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of l.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 79a7b5a | I'll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward: a man cannot steal but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbor's wife but it detects him. 'Tis a blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous th.. | William Shakespeare | ||
| 9c81502 | Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. | Michael Crichton | ||
| dd0319b | What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some. | legislation sexuality | Judith Butler | |
| b2e44dd | All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into t.. | americans existential people | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| 6d3acd2 | The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo. | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| c617872 | We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit...not to prove any final, sociological point, and not event as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life.. | Hunter S. Thompson | ||
| 2ed947c | You remember the fairy tales you were told when you were very small - 'once upon a time...' Why do you think they always began like that?" "Because they weren't true," Simon said promptly. Jane said, caught up in the unreality of the high remote place, "Because perhaps they were true once, but nobody could remember them." | Susan Cooper | ||
| 6e84d3d | For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. | Susan Cooper | ||
| b8b8954 | Come on, girl. Don't cry," whispered Frank. "Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts." Cee wasn't sobbing anymore, but the tears were still running down her cheeks." | Toni Morrison | ||
| 0c90881 | Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 76cf7f5 | They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the .. | Toni Morrison | ||
| d35a651 | The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger. | danger death fear strength | Toni Morrison | |
| b0f689d | But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody. | Toni Morrison | ||
| aa795ed | I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people's eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption.. | Viet Thanh Nguyen | ||
| baf6ada | I'll be damned if death wears my sadness as glad rags. | Ray Bradbury | ||
| a01fd40 | Anything less than your best dishonors God | Francine Rivers | ||
| e9af40a | My parents used to say faith wasn't something you could pretend about. It wasn't real unless it looked like faith and acted like faith. | Karen Kingsbury | ||
| d7c741c | But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn't that right, Terri? But what I liked about the knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn't get hurt very easily. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass." Vassals," Terri said. What?" Mel said. Vassals," Terri said. "Th.. | Raymond Carver | ||
| bd7c417 | It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it. | Raymond Carver | ||
| 03fca5d | I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets. | George Eliot | ||
| e29c030 | The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us. | George Eliot | ||
| 82a3188 | I wish I could be traveling with her, but thank God she able to do it. Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights. | Alice Walker | ||
| 71cd1ea | But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence. | Chaim Potok | ||
| b4d075c | Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference. | Chaim Potok | ||
| c533991 | Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms. | Chaim Potok | ||
| e6e447c | I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views." Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth." | torah truth | Chaim Potok | |
| 48a4824 | the magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think of how lovely Heaven was going to be. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| dc54231 | I'd like to be everybody in the world' I said. 'I'd like to live a million times.' 'Well'--and here my father gave one of his sagely nods--'that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn't it? | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| 6efdc87 | What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. | mental-illness | Sylvia Plath | |
| 9b38952 | My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 701742c | The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| e11f1d9 | The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. | moon night | Sylvia Plath | |
| 72827f0 | To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream | Sylvia Plath | ||
| e5dfa5c | As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| d748102 | He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like. | suicide | Sylvia Plath | |
| 6814312 | beating time along the edge of thought. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| a0d41d4 | If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song. | sylvia-plath | Sylvia Plath | |
| 67373e5 | I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961) | loneliness | Sylvia Plath | |
| 67c34b5 | I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was. | Sylvia Plath |