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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c2fdb29 | The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior. | Richard Wright | ||
| 67cd181 | First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pre.. | love war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 273dd1a | Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 439576b | Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. | sleep | Tim O'Brien | |
| 453d28f | It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achiev.. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a836039 | They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they .. | embarrassment shame war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 8492511 | When you spend your whole life living in a hole," he said, "the only way you can go is up." | Louis Sachar | ||
| 4057550 | If only, if only, the moon speaks no reply; Reflecting the sun and all that's gone by. Be strong my weary wolf, turn around boldly. Fly high my baby bird, My angel, my only. | Louis Sachar | ||
| 813ce82 | She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist. | impossible-love lesbian lgbt love patricia-highsmith society starcrossed-lovers the-price-of-salt | Patricia Highsmith | |
| ef42528 | If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful , or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture. | Patricia Highsmith | ||
| 7ac32d5 | In the meantime, I'll wish it upon a star.'- Michael Cooper | hope love star wish | Julie Ann Knudsen | |
| e392873 | If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 4f2e6a3 | So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 99051f7 | Horrors. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 7b3d1e9 | He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 1bd4b18 | Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 675fbc7 | We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 207e27e | The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 6aff9d0 | What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 084c649 | Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| a965dc6 | The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant .. | Gregory Maguire | ||
| 6ef90ba | Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world. | life | Iain Pears | |
| 67b3922 | But history does matter. There are lines connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. They are obviously morbid. Really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents' story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| 2f42185 | No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| 4ae7951 | The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 83a15ae | Because sometimes it doesn't help to chase after the thing you want. No. Sometimes you have to wait, however long it takes, until what you want most comes to you. | love | Eleanor Herman | |
| 4b83013 | True obedience can only happen when you secretly think you know better, and you choose to bow your head. Anything short of that is just agreement, and any ninny-in-waiting can agree. | Philippa Gregory | ||
| 086fc70 | I am, at this moment, what I have always been to him: an object of beauty. He has never loved me as a woman. | history love objectification objectification-of-women women | Philippa Gregory | |
| 5bb9fbf | I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen. | Philippa Gregory | ||
| 6f40149 | They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man. | Philippa Gregory | ||
| 33a2abb | Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don't see that there is in life only ever one goal.' 'And what is that?' More', George said simply. 'Just more of anything. More of everything. | Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl) | ||
| aff2d5f | It is luck to love someone who is free to love you in return. | Philippa Gregory | ||
| 7b3dcec | He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world. | solitude | Richard Preston | |
| ea2130d | And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, "Chance favors the prepared mind." | Richard Preston | ||
| 0fe2cf7 | A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| ddc80b7 | I doubt trees are ever told to 'be the screwed-up ninth-grader.' | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 49fcc0a | Pie makes everybody happy. | pie pies | Laurie Halse Anderson | |
| b427a15 | I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything. | observer psychology | Laurie Halse Anderson | |
| 25e4e12 | I sit at a table close to his desk. Ivy is in this class. She sits by the door. I keep staring at her, trying to make her look at me. That happens in movies--people can feel it when oother people stare at them and they just have to turn around and say something. Either Ivy has a great force field, or my lazer vision isn't very strong.... | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 52d5cfd | How did I get like this? | eating-disorders | Laurie Halse Anderson | |
| ffbab05 | The gloaming that closed over us the cemetery had crawled inside his skin. | Laurie Halse Anderson | ||
| 09d904d | Tomorrow is another day. I've got plenty of things to worry about right now. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| d019b1e | Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | ||
| 255ca6d | The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you. | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |