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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 778b12f | The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 7675972 | I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. | nature page-49 | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 90c62aa | Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear--you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself | comfort fear story unknown | Rebecca Solnit | |
| d11f3a4 | Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time. | landscape nature page-66 | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 649d8a9 | The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| d038739 | Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lies,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man i.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| ed5dd08 | To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere. | writing | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 3fa2424 | Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| a3bac41 | If grace belongs to God, there are those who say that luck belongs to the Devil and that he looks after his own. | god grace luck | Sarah Dunant | |
| df0fa3f | Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see "the unfathomable stupidity of man" | introverts stupidity-of-man | Michael Finkel | |
| 81aa68c | Power rises to the top like cream and dominates the weak with cruelty disguised as -- and often even believed to be -- benevolence. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 56a2242 | I think comfort can be a curse, an addiction that without warning or notice erodes hope. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 1a895ee | An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy. | observer silence | Susanna Kaysen | |
| 086133b | I can't help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn't fucking married. | marriage poetry | A.J. Jacobs | |
| 5b3ae93 | I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world. | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| c89906d | The whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new .. | A.J. Jacobs | ||
| e91829c | Did you hear about the middle Eastern potentate?" he asked me. "This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in the kingdom, and said, "I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn."The wise men went off, and after year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. This potentate looked at it and he said, "No. It's too long. Make it shorter." So the wise men went off .. | life | A.J. Jacobs | |
| 358b12e | If you take a book with you on a journey,' Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, 'an odd thing happens: the book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 943f119 | How loud a heart could beat. Until it took your breath away. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| b74e003 | Many [book] even lay flat in the floor open. Their spines upward. Elinor couldn't bear to look! Didn't the monster know that was the way to break a book's neck? | reading | Cornelia Funke | |
| fa0c3d2 | Sometimes, when I went to the spring to wash early in the morning," he murmured, "there'd be tiny fairies flitting around above the water, not much bigger than the butterflies you have here, and blue as violet petals. They liked to fly into my hair. Sometimes they spat in my face. They weren't very friendly, but they shone like glowworms by night. I sometimes caught one and put it in a jar. If I let it out at night before going to sleep I h.. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 5d97a79 | A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 1a2d4d6 | All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. | Paul Theroux | ||
| e214ed8 | You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. | Paul Theroux | ||
| 8096761 | Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. | serendipity stories travel travel-writing | Paul Theroux | |
| 7f4d064 | I added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument. | Paul Theroux | ||
| b9409bc | Unquestioning obedience is for slaves, the uneducated and the pathetic. | Trudi Canavan | ||
| 2746484 | While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before--no, dived before, Violet--from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome.. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| 13aed26 | Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them. | William Saroyan | ||
| 80531fc | Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. | William Saroyan | ||
| 783203b | Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?" | Jack Kerouac | ||
| a0bf3bf | The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled. Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby - T.. | fashions jack-kerouac sex word-sketch | Jack Kerouac | |
| b3a33cf | A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. | beat early-stories-and-other-writings jack-kerouac optimist prose-poetry society the-poet timeless | Jack Kerouac | |
| 2ef1faa | Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind." But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off." | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 46fdd98 | A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say. | Georges Perec | ||
| 4ce9c74 | mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having. | William Gaddis | ||
| f136135 | In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. | impression intellect irrational man passion rational reason reflection | Ford Madox Ford | |
| 249eb0d | W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other. | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| 185f0b7 | Ix-nay!" I hissed at him. "Ix-nay!" I didn't know why I resorted to Pig Latin right then. It just seemed like the thing to do." | T.J. Klune | ||
| a6c1c48 | The ass to end all asses," I said, unable to stop myself. "The Holy Grail of asses. If we lived in a world with fairies and elves, there would be epic quests to go get that ass. I wanted to bite it." | T.J. Klune | ||
| 405797a | No cursing," I scolded him. "You're a knight. You don't get to do that. You gave up that right when you swore your oath to the King. You have to lead by example now. So say stuff like 'fudge toast' and 'mothercrackers' instead of 'shit whore' and 'fuck storm." | T.J. Klune | ||
| c48b821 | Monsters are real. Magic is real. The world is a dark and frightening place and it's all real. | T.J. Klune | ||
| 551ee50 | For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world. | order randomness | Stanisław Lem | |
| b760626 | Please remember that just because love isn't expressed doesn't mean it isn't felt. | elizabeth hoyt |