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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 334883f | He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving. | D.H. Lawrence | ||
| 0f82f28 | But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people.[..]And if it is so, why is it? she asked, hostile.They were rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition. Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust?Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe.They hang on to their old positions when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot. | D.H. Lawrence | ||
| 3059d5c | On revient toujours a son premier amour." It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier amour." But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half cir.. | first-love man woman | D.H. Lawrence | |
| 17b268b | I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself. | D.H. Lawrence | ||
| 45fd3f8 | Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart. | Richard Ford | ||
| d2dc750 | Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn't see how it worked. 'Slow down,' he said, 'so I can see how you do it,' but she'd laughed and said, 'I can't slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn't do it at all. | inspirational | Hilary Mantel | |
| 0e03979 | Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| abe7519 | The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like t.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| be7aed3 | It is community and respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 96cf418 | He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he'd guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 6020627 | Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f561c8d | There is no later. This is later. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f9d872a | He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent's flesh for its bite. He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that whic.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 5664018 | It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin? You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 65f0e81 | Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or .. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b258bbf | Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| cd43a08 | The first rule of tinkering is, of course, 'save all the parts.' But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is . Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative.. | David Mamet | ||
| 4058463 | We can only interpret the behavior of others through the screen we create. | David Mamet | ||
| 44f289d | and the stars were icicles of mockery | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 36ea3b6 | The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives. | universe | Annie Dillard | |
| 7a1727a | Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 5541181 | The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. | god soul | Annie Dillard | |
| b47b305 | I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. | Annie Dillard | ||
| fbe83da | If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?" | Annie Dillard | ||
| 3f8798d | What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as y.. | childhood gratitude joy knowledge memoir wonder | Annie Dillard | |
| e5fdfe9 | Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light...unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous...we don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combination.. | landscape mystery mysticism spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| ee34b19 | Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they're there....when I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shad.. | globe landscape nature spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| f95fb9c | We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both. [p. 253] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 636501a | When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town. | Anne Lamott | ||
| d601f4f | Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one. | Anne Lamott | ||
| cb7b3b1 | He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't. | space-exploration | Mary Roach | |
| 01b063d | Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. [...] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer c.. | funeral | Mary Roach | |
| 9b6b969 | Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life. | heroism military science | Mary Roach | |
| 8b84db4 | People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New .. | Mary Roach | ||
| b0dbe67 | Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. | sex | Mary Roach | |
| 2f0635b | I've found, as a general rule of life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| e232d08 | She laughed - a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused. | jeeves laughter wodehouse | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| bfb4d3e | The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good. | humour letters writing writing-life | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| e41b9e7 | I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys, but it was plain from the outset that if Roderick Spode had a sunnier side, he had not come with any idea of exhibiting it now. His manner was curt. One sensed the absence of the bonhomous note. ... Here he laid a hand on my shoulder, and I can't remember when I have experienced anything more unpleasant. Apart from what Jeeves would have.. | jeeves wodehouse wooster | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| c3ab5d1 | These dreamer types do live, don't they? | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 4aff53a | She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape. | humorous wodehouse | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 15f7f5c | When Cynthia smiles," said young Bingo, "the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue; birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles." He coughed, changing gears. "When Cynthia frowns - " "What the devil are you talking about?" "I'm reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I'll go on, shall I?" "No!" "No?" "No. I haven't had my tea." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 41f1649 | You can't stay in the dark for too long. Something inside you starts to fade, and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light. | desperation light | Amy Tan | |
| 24cd571 | When I returned home that day, I saw my life as if I already knew the happy ending of a story. I looked around the house and thought, soon I will no longer have to see these walls and all the unhappiness they keep inside. | Amy Tan |