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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| de31379 | What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes? | colonialism hatred repression resentment suppression | Jean-Paul Sartre | |
| 638e2c6 | Perhaps it's inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all, or impersonating what one is. That would be terrible,' he said to himself: 'it would mean that we were duped by nature. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| cd14321 | They strip-searched me!" he burst out. "Me! Old enough to be their grandfather and they made me stand naked in the road, my things all unpacked in the mud!" | Julia Golding | ||
| 75330de | Sorry Johnny." "Sorry for what " "For shouting at you. It's just that when I think about the future I keep panicking. It's like falling from the top of the stairs in the dark not knowing where I'll end up." He put his arm around my shoulders. "I understand. Life is precarious for most of us but more so for you. What you forget is what most of your friends see in you." "What's that " "The ability to beat the odds..." "And fall on my .. | future hope survival | Julia Golding | |
| db215bc | Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness. | science | Frank Herbert | |
| 33fae18 | The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 8edffff | Jessica stopped beside him: 'What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.' He spoke mechanically: 'If only adults could relax like that.' 'Yes.' 'When do we lose it?' He murmured... 'We do indeed lose something,' she said. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 87297bd | Full moon calls thee-- Shai-hulud shall thou see; Red the night, dusky sky, Bloody death didst thou die. We pray to a moon: she is round-- Luck with us will then abound, What we seek for shall be found In the land of solid ground. | Frank Herbert | ||
| c887219 | There was a man so wise, He jumped into A sandy place And burnt out both his eyes! And when he knew his eyes were gone, He offered no complaint. He summoned up a vision And made himself a saint. -Children's Verse from History of Muad'dib | frank-herbert | Frank Herbert | |
| 4a79d05 | Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Leto said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves. | identity self | Frank Herbert | |
| 9ad70c4 | The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. | Frank Herbert | ||
| eae409e | We've lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy--or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing? | Frank Herbert | ||
| 2fb05d4 | There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge ver.. | engineering physics school | Neal Stephenson | |
| f3c5ead | Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d34a2e9 | World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the hand.. | food life | Neal Stephenson | |
| dc653bb | It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 92040e6 | Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7b2b906 | the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 19efc19 | If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cd25ba4 | Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fd94fb5 | They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9468282 | CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ee60477 | So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind thi.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 36e6521 | How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[...] +I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7ca0c89 | From long experience in places like Afghanisatan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognised, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what,.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c3570fb | You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not." "Why do you say that?" "Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices - who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9e0627d | Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from.. | crime detective-stories detectives investigations mysteries | Kate Summerscale | |
| c0bce65 | It's so hard for women--even nice women--to realize that their bodies are not irresistible. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 8dbd0ee | Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood" | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 842f7bb | The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have | writing | Raymond Chandler | |
| 2e7efd1 | Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatical.. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 64fbd3d | If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 75a4937 | Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t." | philosophers | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| deb2086 | No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 7f65084 | Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 040152d | You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7f31f20 | You have failed in the most base and human of ways--you have not imagined the lives of others. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| c0d29e4 | He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.' 'You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.' 'But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8596b05 | Yes," she answers and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghoast might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it-that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer." | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 7560b69 | But what was possible or practical had been replaced by a far baser impulse. Hope. | Ted Dekker | ||
| 4bac428 | When did speaking your beliefs become synonymous with forcing them upon others? | Ted Dekker | ||
| b7f8996 | Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 713dc2a | In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who'd been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 11d0911 | He didn't understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him. | Jeffrey Eugenides |