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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f0cb4b4 | I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ... ('Adopted-orphan smile', I mean, that's not bad, come on.) | compulsive-lying crazy-bitch ego egotistical fantasy liar lie lies out-of-touch-with-reality pretending reality self-righteous smile smiling superiority-complex vain vainity wannabe wannabewriter writer writing | Gillian Flynn | |
| fe46dd6 | People have to do awful things for money. | money-issues | Gillian Flynn | |
| 4e2540b | TESLA'S CAT [Nikola Tesla's favorite childhood companion] was the family's black cat, Macak. Macak followed young Nikola everywhere, and they spent many happy hours rolling on the grass. It was Macak the cat who introduced Tesla to electricity on a dry winter evening. "As I stroked Macak's back," he recalled, "I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak's back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks.. | macak static-electricity tesla | W. Bernard Carlson | |
| f929c36 | Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. "A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud." | Joan Didion | ||
| f2df357 | When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. | Joan Didion | ||
| eaaead8 | Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. | criticism film movie reviewers | Joan Didion | |
| e169e88 | It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with.. | joan didion | ||
| 7721535 | They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 78ec928 | Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4674ca0 | It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4ef4853 | I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should. | Joan Didion | ||
| 08341e8 | Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice | Joan Didion | ||
| fef8416 | Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from.. | William Styron | ||
| 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 |