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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | |
| 1be5516 | Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no cr.. | Chinua Achebe | ||
| cd6b039 | The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the charact.. | Chinua Achebe | ||
| 7e7d96d | The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. | experience language | Chinua Achebe | |
| e79c39f | Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their.. | important powerful profound revolution | James Baldwin | |
| 973d23e | To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. | James Baldwin | ||
| 931d7c0 | These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once mo.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1c77d37 | Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. | culture society talent writing | James Baldwin | |
| 40b3df5 | It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached. | James Baldwin | ||
| fe6f681 | n lqlb lkrym ymkn 'n yHb mn qbyl lshfq@ | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | ||
| 804914c | Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys? | Robert Cormier | ||
| fc23bd7 | You're very insistent, but I'm very busy. | insistent | Ralph Ellison | |
| 49985db | Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two... | freedom poor rich the-diamond-as-big-as-the-ritz | F. Scott Fitzgerald | |
| aa0d4b0 | Do we have a plan?" "A couple." Jim said. "Either of them good?" "Oh, no. Not at all. Just different flavors of terrible." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 397d087 | No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 83a299a | Well, mostly I'm a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante's killer? That's kind of awesome. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 8201c6b | The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3e62f7e | We're not making any official statements, especially when James Holden's in the room. No offense, but your track record for blurting information at inopportune moments is the stuff of legend. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| b30fa64 | They're all fucking men," she said. "Excuse me?" Soren said. "The generals. They're all fucking men." "I thought Souther was the only--" "I don't mean that they all fuck men. I mean they're all men, the fuckers. How long has it been since a woman was in charge of the armed forces? Not since I came here. So instead, we wind up with another example of what happens to policy when there's too much testosterone in the room." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 42ec82f | No, it wasn't. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi's paradox I can think of. Do you know why there aren't any Indians in your Old West analogy? Because they're already dead. The whatever-they-were that built all that got a head start and used their protomolecule gate builder to kill all the rest. And that's not even the scary part. The really frightening part is that something else came along, shot the first guys in the back of the .. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 16ef989 | They'd made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they'd hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified. | James S.A. Corey |