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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 44cc50b | Why do you want to read anyway - for the sake of amusement or mere erudition? Those are poor, fatuous pretexts. Reading should serve the goal of attaining peace; if it doesn't make you peaceful, what good is it? | Epictetus | ||
| 8e364c0 | The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound health when you enter. | philosophy | Epictetus | |
| 92ff562 | For sheep don't throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk. | Epictetus | ||
| b57a91c | As the sun does not wait for prayers and incantations tob e induced to rise, but immediately shines and is saluted by all, so do you also not wait for clappings of hands and shouts of praise tob e induced to do good, but be a doer of good voluntarily and you will be beloved as much as the sun. | humbleness sun | Epictetus | |
| 06462d2 | You will do the greatest services to the state, if you shall raise not the roofs of the houses, but the souls of the citizens: for it is better that great souls should dwell in small houses than for mean slaves to lurk in great houses. | Epictetus | ||
| 1d88005 | Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear. | Jeannette Walls | ||
| cf91a90 | Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life. | life state-benefits welfare | Jeannette Walls | |
| c2100fe | This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently. | aware conscious | Sebastian Faulks | |
| 6e66d48 | The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it. | Luanne Rice | ||
| fdd8115 | Clear nights are sometimes the coldest. | women | Luanne Rice | |
| 7aa0faf | I could have spent my time hugging you or I could have spent my time telling you not to touch hot stoves or take candy from men. Which did you want? | Laurie Notaro | ||
| da5b088 | It was 1976. It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful ex.. | health humor junior-high menstruation nurse school | Laurie Notaro | |
| 03405d4 | Oh boy. Too drunk to hold on to a whiskey and Coke and the word "pretty." That's not a combination with a positive outcome. Not good at all. That's the secret password that usually leaves me trying to find a ride home in the morning." | Laurie Notaro | ||
| 65c68a3 | The thing is that this life is so precious and mysterious, I don't know what to say about it most of the time. Words are like birds, passing through the trackless sky. The dog barking, the sound of the purling stream, the wind among the weeping willow trees: how are these not right off the tongue of the Buddha?" --Lama Surya Das" | lama-surya-das-scandal surya-das surya-das-affair surya-das-controversy surya-das-scandal | Lama Surya Das | |
| 9a09abf | My friends are the beings through whom God loves me. | Mark Nepo | ||
| 8108127 | She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 1f17f1d | The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy.. | literature morality | azar Nafisi | |
| e4db5e1 | In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d7a6d2c | I do so think well of a man who dies with finesse. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 7592784 | The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. | Michael Crichton | ||
| bcaaec2 | Personally, I don't deal much in theory. I have to deal with the facts. And on the basis of facts, I don't see much difference in the behavior of men and women. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d1ec138 | My own sense is that the acquisition of self knowledge has been made difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the creations of human beings. The natural world, the traditional source of self-awareness, is increasingly absent. | nature self-awareness | Michael Crichton | |
| cf0a803 | Each person bears a fear which is special to him. One man fears a close space and another man fears drowning; each laughs at the other and calls him stupid. Thus fear is only a preference, to be counted the same as the preference for one woman or another, or mutton for pig, or cabbage for onion. | fear | Michael Crichton | |
| 3db2804 | A happy love is full of quarrels, you know. | Jean Anouilh | ||
| a4c63e9 | Where there is a lack of other connections, of meaningful moments, in our lives, music can often full the gap. | Sena Jeter Naslund | ||
| bec886c | This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it--that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. | gun-culture used-car-salesmen | Hunter S. Thompson | |
| 4d90ee5 | when you see someone in a tree trying to protect it , you know that every level of our society have failed , the consumers have failed , the companies have failed , the government has failed . | Julia Butterfly Hill | ||
| 6905354 | Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What's real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won't necessarily understand why it worked. | Scott Adams | ||
| 7766b03 | Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don't know as much as you thought you knew. | Scott Adams | ||
| 03bfcc5 | IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding. | Vladimir Nabokov | ||
| ec8282d | Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. | Herman Melville | ||
| 7fb0bc0 | Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 63005fc | I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message. | sadness | Aimee Bender | |
| 4d1b254 | I can't tell you exactly what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul. I want to be violated by insight. | wisheses | Aimee Bender | |
| 97581eb | Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 396e3e7 | He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically. | Robert Ludlum | ||
| 6e741d6 | He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream. | isolation respect | Orson Scott Card | |
| 67293ff | So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other. | genius miscommunication war | Orson Scott Card | |
| 1a1bb65 | Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember--the enemy's gate is . If you step through your own door like you're out for a stroll, you're a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher. | flasher target | Orson Scott Card | |
| 25da2b6 | I saw, I wrote, and the world changed a little. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 90c5c95 | She likes us," said Umbo. "I know, I could feel it too," said Rigg. "She's really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children." "Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew." "They were delicious." | Orson Scott Card | ||
| bfc4c2d | She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minu.. | Robin McKinley | ||
| 50effed | Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, "I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave." The grown-ups usually thought this was darling, which only made her angry, perhaps partly because she was speaking the truth, alt.. | Robin McKinley | ||
| 532007f | There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for. | literature thankful | l.m. montgomery |