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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 426de77 | I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think? | Kate Atkinson | ||
| f9708a7 | although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time) | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 532d92c | I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 591b033 | Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 0ef2322 | Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. | Armistead Maupin | ||
| 4c29e3d | There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 4c36f61 | Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 8ba0711 | We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come. | John Fowles | ||
| d746cbc | What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me. | love selfish selfishness | John Fowles | |
| db166cd | It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly. | youthful-arrogance | John Fowles | |
| 34ebf94 | It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did | John Fowles | ||
| 184bc35 | She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls. | poetry romantic | John Fowles | |
| f183d75 | Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious. | P. D. James | ||
| 67133e7 | I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them. | complaining rebellion | Pat Conroy | |
| 37ea803 | I have come to revere words like "democracy" and "freedom," the right to vote, the incomprehensibly beautiful origins of my country, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I not see America's flaws? Of course I do. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. . . . I have come .. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 3ee6d92 | I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 88360fb | I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told. | secrets silence | Pat Conroy | |
| e60be89 | The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience. | Pat Conroy | ||
| f24e240 | Time moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it gives you only one chance. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 21cb28e | Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. P.. | oysters south-carolina | Pat Conroy | |
| 6b81484 | In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake. | Pat Conroy | ||
| 264de8d | And, selfish and scared, I wonder how much more he has to give. | michael-zulli neil-gaiman | Neil Gaiman | |
| 467f17c | The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 456358b | This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 3692ba2 | It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and s.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 17a9de1 | They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a9cd085 | The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| d1d1d9b | None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| f9c300c | A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. | respect soldiers war | Henry David Thoreau | |
| d58af3d | What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| b55185c | This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manik.. | thoreau | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 3bbfd79 | If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism. | Terry Eagleton | ||
| 1599f6f | Where is the sound?" someone hastily scribbled on the blackboard, and they all waited anxiously for the reply. Milo caught his breath, picked up the chalk, and explained simply, "It's on the tip of my tongue." | Norton Juster | ||
| 3f25849 | Do you think it will rain? Milo: But I thought you were the Weather Man? No, I'm the Whether man, for it is more important to know whether there will be weather, whether than what the weather will be. | Norton Juster | ||
| 2fb5bb3 | I don't think you understand," said Milo timidly as the watchdog growled a warning. "We're looking for a place to spend the night." "It's not yours to spend," the bird shrieked again, and followed it with the same horrible laugh. "That doesn't make any sense, you see--" he started to explain. "Dollars or cents, it's still not yours to spend," the bird replied haughtily. "But I didn't mean--" insisted Milo. "Of course you're mean," interrupt.. | wordplay | Norton Juster | |
| e6408aa | Why don't they live in Illusions?' suggested the Humbug. 'It's much prettier.' 'Many of them do,' he answered, walking in the direction of the forest once again, 'but it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is. | Norton Juster | ||
| a7a3a33 | She wasn't only gay, she was a gay elf. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 4eaf031 | Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| d117bc9 | What you lack in any investigation is time. With every passing hour, evidence slips away. Crime scenes are compromised by people and the elements. Things are moved, altered, smeared, shifted. Organisms rot. Wind blows dust and contaminants. Memories change and fade. As you move away from the event, you move away from the solution. | criminal-investigation | Maureen Johnson | |
| 4ad9964 | Spicy food and I have a close relationship--an obsessive one, in fact. If it's spicy, I want it. I want to sweat and shake and go half blind from the searing pain . . . which, now that I put it that way, seems really suggestive. But spicy stuff is addictive. That's a known fact of science. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 7a59195 | Although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak. | Maureen Johnson | ||
| 6706291 | Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 517d298 | He stopped and looked at her. "Your eyes are leaking." "It's the flowers. They make me sneeze." "Then let us be away from the garden. Open the door, love, if you will." She obeyed, then froze halfway over the threshold. "What did you call me?" "The first of countless endearments if you'll but stir yourself to hold our current course." | Lynn Kurland | ||
| b74760f | Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. "I have kola," he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest. "Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it," replied Okoye passing back the disc. "No, it is for you, I think," and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepte.. | books humor random things-fall-apart | Chinua Achebe |