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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6c936b8 | The system didn't screw you. The system revealed you. | Michael Crichton | ||
| e97000a | Even if you don't believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d8aa96b | She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist. | life | Michael Crichton | |
| 47fec35 | If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined. | gambling vice | Michael Crichton | |
| b60aa56 | Only assholes put a nickname on their business card. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a453532 | You disgust me, all of you, with your happiness! With your life that must be loved at all costs. [...] I spit on your idea of life! [...] You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell! [...] I do not want to understand. I am here for something other than understanding. I am here to tell you no, and to die. To tell you no and to die. | Jean Anouilh | ||
| 7442844 | Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination. | Judith Butler | ||
| 5236f10 | I'm sorry to burden you,' she said. She felt like a crybaby. 'What can we do with our stories,' he said, 'but tell them? | life stories | Sena Jeter Naslund | |
| 6c4236c | When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 6481c0f | Unless carefree, mother love was a killer. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 4db1ed4 | She became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 1f2ed4a | And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and cl.. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 76e1633 | They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement--rope, a palm leaf cross, handc.. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 98b046d | They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears. | laughter | Toni Morrison | |
| 67aca3e | An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. | hope hopelessness | Barbara W. Tuchman | |
| b700005 | The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want.. | Barbara W. Tuchman | ||
| 0e095e7 | I learned a long time ago we've control of little in this world, Amanda. It doesn't belong to us. It's out of our hands. Like being born or being sold into prostitution at eight. All we can change is the way we think and the way we live. | Francine Rivers | ||
| 958fbe6 | They'd had fun, for sure. They laughed and enjoyed being together. But if she was painfully honest with herself, something was missing. Something in the way Tim looked at her. She remembered her mom's word. "I saw the way he looked at you...he adores you." Maybe that was it. Tim looked at her on a surface level. He smiled and seemed happy to see her. But When Cody looked at her, there were no layers left, nothing her didn't reveal, nothing .. | cody-coleman love | Karen Kingsbury | |
| 85309d9 | A verse came to mind, one that has comforted Kari before. It was the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. If he cried over Jerusalem, if he cried over the death of Lazarus, surely he was crying now over the death of her dreams, the death of her marriage. | Karen Kingsbury | ||
| 1c57743 | You don't love someone you lie to. And you don't lie to someone you love. | Karen Kingsbury | ||
| 6f3d011 | Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life. | Raymond Carver | ||
| b363488 | Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive. Fear of falling asleep at night. Fear of not falling asleep. Fear of the past rising up. Fear of the present taking flight. Fear of the telephone that rings in the dead of night. Fear of electrical storms. Fear of the cleaning woman who has a spot on her cheek! Fear of dogs I've been told won't bite. Fear of anxiety! Fear of having to identify the body of a dead friend. Fear of running out of.. | Raymond Carver | ||
| 1f7071f | I was giving up-- , as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 7e9e5b2 | Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true--rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| bfa429f | And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be. | belief change death faith life soul spirit | alice walker | |
| 80f295c | the world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat. | Alice Walker | ||
| 4511db4 | Aside from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat. | weight | Alice Walker | |
| e8360cb | If it seems too good to be true... it probably is. | Melody Carlson | ||
| 6a80f97 | And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than .. | life world-view | Saul Bellow | |
| 80f745b | Fidelity is for phonographs | Saul Bellow | ||
| 62d974e | Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 11f3312 | I cannot have gone through what I went through and have lost what I lost if it's all meaningless. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 7578426 | I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 6b7bf89 | A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 79899f1 | I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 6a21b3f | And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all. | uncertainty | Sylvia Plath | |
| 650e1cc | I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| ce38fcf | A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin. | self-assurance | Sylvia Plath | |
| 4edfe96 | Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts Nor the woman in the ambulance Whore red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly .... Oh my God, what am I | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 923812b | This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| a4c17ca | With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand...hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some g.. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| e355af9 | I am the magician's girl who does not flinch. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 24faa10 | I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| a6f5916 | A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body. | John Updike |