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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 75ceb30 | Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters." Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8518660 | They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue. The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 15dc7e8 | he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility,.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 75b367a | Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know." "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer. "At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'" "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 20f1867 | Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| ea248eb | Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to si.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 59ced71 | It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it. | humour metaphor simile | Raymond Chandler | |
| 7f870e5 | Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, gre.. | corruption crime injustice justice money prison | Raymond Chandler | |
| 7f3fa86 | Tall, aren't you? I didn't mean to be. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| a1d52ee | She was thinking. i could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| b2d8d80 | One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 87024fd | Just because someone sees the truth doesn't mean they will accept it or allow that truth to change them. | Ted Dekker | ||
| 9663903 | Know that you are loved, my dear...Know that you can and will rise above all your fears. I now call you water walker. Water Walker? Yes, you walked through the waters of your fear, didn't you? | Ted Dekker | ||
| a65f740 | How can there be love without a true choice? Would you suggest that man be stripped of the capacity to love? | Ted Dekker | ||
| 12da3d0 | A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| b2a2ece | We lost them in the vastness of their dresses and found them again, squeezed the pulp of their bodies and inhaled the perfume of their exertion. A few of us grew brave enough to insert our legs between theirs and to press our agony against them. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| fc90550 | She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 2265ef3 | It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 7e99ce5 | Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 8c08a62 | Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come to come before a sense of genuine sharing. | sharing | Stephen R. Covey | |
| 7796873 | They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. | p69 philosophy wisdom | Stephen R. Covey | |
| f175b00 | Never struggle with anyone or anything. When you're pushed, pull; when you're pulled, push. | Dan Millman | ||
| 86f2959 | Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. | highway santa-fe trains water | Truman Capote | |
| c6816d0 | Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing. | marriage women | Truman Capote | |
| 98c6adb | And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you've been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself. | Truman Capote | ||
| 81be1a2 | The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick." | Truman Capote | ||
| 23e2fa9 | It's like Tiffany's," she said. "Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds. I can't wait." | Truman Capote | ||
| 76715ef | because when it all comes down to it, there's no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it's better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell's next single was, as long as we have 'Tainted Love'?" I stop. You're still listening. "Wait," I say. "What was I talking about? How did we get to 'Tainted Love'?" "Let's see," you say, "I believ.. | David Levithan | ||
| 7cf2999 | There's something really the matter with most people who wear tattoos. There's at least some terrible story. I know from experience that there's always something terribly flawed about people who are tattooed, above some little something that Johnny had done in the Navy, even though that's a bad sign...It's terrible. Psychologically it's crazy. Most people who are tattooed, it's the sign of some feeling of inferiority, they're trying to esta.. | tattooing tattoos | Truman Capote | |
| d3bae4a | But the address, if it ever existed, never was sent, which made me sad, there was so much I wanted to write her: that I'd sold two stories, had read where the Trawlers were countersuing for divorce, was moving out of the brownstone because it was haunted. But mostly, I wanted to tell about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alar.. | Truman Capote | ||
| 1c75835 | he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life | Edith Wharton | ||
| 780c541 | Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 85343ee | A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself | Edith Wharton | ||
| ac09a71 | She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air. | Edith Wharton | ||
| b6db7df | We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted? | Edith Wharton | ||
| 29fd0fc | The Universe is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do. | Douglas Adams | ||
| b7b9ef5 | If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been.. | german humour stereotypes | Douglas Adams | |
| b8c192e | The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 91a84ac | I don't know what this great thing I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right? "The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it. [...] "But this former self of mine killed himse.. | thought | Douglas Adams | |
| 8d8ef44 | I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 334d0a5 | It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, the.. | advice life-decisions | Douglas Adams | |
| 30c8dbe | You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands! | Douglas Adams | ||
| 9823099 | From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 4862c25 | Then shouldering their burdens, they set off, seeking a path that would bring them over the grey hills of the Emyn Muil, and down into the Land of Shadow. | J.R.R. Tolkien |