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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a3bbdd4 | To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love. | Richard Russo | ||
| 1d832e5 | Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." | slow speed | Richard Russo | |
| ccb3897 | That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears. | Richard Russo | ||
| 1d296e2 | At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars. | Richard Ford | ||
| 82befa1 | What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;... to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. | Richard Ford | ||
| a981480 | She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind. | Richard Ford | ||
| 7e6729e | H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap... | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4988d91 | There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| dc89b44 | He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 6ba48b0 | This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war. | children war | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 5f3a167 | She smiled and sipped from her glass. There was altogether too much of her sitting there, the broad expanse of thigh cradled in the insubstantial stocking and the garters with the pale flesh pursed and her full breasts and the sootblack piping of her eyelids, a gaudish rake of metaldust in prussian blue where cerulean moths fluttered her awake from some outlandish dream. Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 192e8cb | Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 0d7e49b | He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness. He said these things to me with great earnestness and great gentleness and in the light from the portal I could see tha.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| eebc7f8 | It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine... | hobbesian | Cormac McCarthy | |
| a79c5dc | As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 40a1a12 | In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 7cd6866 | Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 8f3ff0a | Words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| e257e44 | For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 348674a | He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 3940fc9 | Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions. | success | David Mamet | |
| 790034a | This can't go on all the time...all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| e28d596 | There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged. | writing | Annie Dillard | |
| 85d9bc3 | Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. | death life passage time | Annie Dillard | |
| 06b38c8 | Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifet.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 02436c4 | There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it. | wisdom | Annie Dillard | |
| 76978dd | Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 2ee444c | Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious to the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people - he doesn't notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, sh.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 9800f48 | Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside. It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integri.. | beauty faces feature older | Anne Lamott | |
| bb26305 | Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable. | Anne Lamott | ||
| b5f3b88 | My favorite moment in Jeanne Moreau's latest movie--a comedy called --takes place in a kitchen, when she proclaims that every human has something to cry about. When mocked by the owner of the kitchen and pressed to say what it is that we have to cry about, she tosses back her head of flaming red hair and says, "The winds of solitude roaring at the edge of infinity." | Anne Lamott | ||
| 91c3c53 | These two things are almost all I want, but unfortunately, neither one is my strong suit. I am very strong on blame, and wish this were one of God's values, but trust, surrender? Letting go, forgiveness? Maybe just after a period of prayer, but then when the mood passes and real life rears its ugly head again? Not so much. I hate this, the fact that life is usually Chutes and Ladders, with no guaranteed gains. I cannot will myself into havi.. | forgiveness happy letting-go prayer surrender trust | Anne Lamott | |
| 46d30c9 | Here are the two best prayers I know: "Help me help me, help me," and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." -- | Anne Lamott | ||
| ad99880 | Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 84c17c1 | Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 75e8bcc | Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. | travel | Mary Roach | |
| 3975755 | I am very much out of my element here. There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, "I felt at one with the divine source of creation." Mary Roach on a conducted tour of Hades. I had to fight the urge to push back my chair and start screaming: STAND BACK! ALL OF YOU! I'VE GOT AN ARTHUR FINDLAY BOX CUTTER! Instead, I quietly excused.. | humor medium psychic science | Mary Roach | |
| ee143de | I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks. | science | Mary Roach | |
| 5b5f5bf | It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial." | Mary Roach | ||
| acc78b1 | there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation. | humor ink writing | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| cbac531 | There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 20624b9 | I shoved on a dressing-gown, and flew downstairs like a mighty, rushing wind. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 8d3ca68 | What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?" "Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 4c011c9 | What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?... | mother mother-and-daughter motherhood words | Amy Tan |