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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4e30351 | The earth has a mouth?" Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips," my father said. Jack," my mother said, laughing, "stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?" | Alice Sebold | ||
| f39c2bd | Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself....To live only for some future goal is sh.. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 23091ca | You don't analyze love. You accept it. | Nina Bangs | ||
| 960a5e5 | You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is? | Anne Tyler | ||
| 8df344d | I'm falling into disrepair | funny-but-sad | Anne Tyler | |
| 15fb3ea | He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no. | Anne Tyler | ||
| ac8c28b | When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 2c221b3 | He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. THe lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone- flowing. The stone had the stillness of one last movement when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. THe stone glowed wet with sunrays. The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The roc.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 573cd06 | how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?" "By holding on to just one rule." "Which?" "To place nothing-nothing-above the verdict of my own mind." | Ayn Rand | ||
| 2bc9065 | Then she remembered. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8992607 | The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that. | objectivism philosophy taggart | Ayn Rand | |
| aade5ed | The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and.. | introspective | Ayn Rand | |
| f08f038 | But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice | groupthink masses | Ayn Rand | |
| 7e25fa9 | It is a sin to think words no others think | Ayn Rand | ||
| 37803ab | The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 27c68e0 | Through the dry phases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action. | Ayn Rand | ||
| b612a7b | He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning to a point at the birch tree behind him saying the the tone of their childhood game: 'I'd wish you'd learn to run faster I'll always have to wait for yo.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 2714d3c | Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists--amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature"--there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision--i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears.... In order to survive, man has to discover and produc.. | manufacturing nature productivity survival | Ayn Rand | |
| 8cd916f | Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of which you dont | Ayn Rand | ||
| d2ea97d | Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement. | love marriage marriage-advice passion | Nathaniel Branden | |
| 0c641c3 | If my aim is to prove I am "enough," the project goes on to infinity--because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable." | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| 9e220d4 | And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches... | Billy Collins | ||
| 4e6286c | This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore... This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle-- ...too much to name, too much to think about. | life life-lessons | Billy Collins | |
| d5071ce | Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable. | Donald A. Norman | ||
| fa65b8d | But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all. | robert-harris | Robert Harris | |
| 952c2f9 | Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity. | Robert Harris | ||
| 0d450c8 | You see, there's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 321f49a | It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin? This, however, may be a matter of appearance. | greatest-good | John Steinbeck | |
| f80b132 | Why don't you go on west to California? There's work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in. Why don't you go there? | John Steinbeck | ||
| b2f6134 | Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice. | personality philosophy psychology tom-hamilton | John Steinbeck | |
| 9879bca | They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 5e614f2 | Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. | language sterilization uniformity | John Steinbeck | |
| 6e2b2d7 | But Charley doesn't have our problems. He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn't even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters' marriage. It's quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply a.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 431005f | In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what .. | fight god unhappy | John Steinbeck | |
| 6d4a6aa | This is the greatest mystery of the human mind--the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain. | dissonance harmony inductive-leap meaning pain | John Steinbeck | |
| b029fbb | Thou mayest rule over sin,' Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles -- only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. 'Thou mayest, Thou mayest!' What glory! | John Steinbeck | ||
| 43d4e2c | It set him free," said Lee. "It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man." "That's lonely." "All great and precious things are lonely." "What is the word again?" "Timshel--thou mayest." | John Steinbeck | ||
| 21b1e74 | He is one of those whom God has not quite finished. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 3f55d6d | It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don't want to do. | John Steinbeck | ||
| e84e36f | I can't tell you how to live your life," Samuel said, "although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining--small mining. You're too young a man to be panning me.. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 68761a2 | The women watched the men, watched to see whether the break had come at last. The women stood silently and watched. And where a number of men gathered together, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place. And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right - the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath. | profound | John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath | |
| 4e2f1f7 | I'm tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it. | John Steinbeck | ||
| 3440b09 | I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. | intelligence labor labor-activism manual-labor | John Steinbeck | |
| bc89e86 | I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. | John Steinbeck |