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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| daee5ac | Gentleness shown once is mercy, shown twice is folly. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 7601f90 | Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast be.. | anger patience | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| 140b92c | The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle. | Charles Stross | ||
| b0c638f | Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches... | sff | Charles Stross | |
| c96408b | To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? | star-trek to-boldly-go | Charles Stross | |
| 9965dd2 | Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| f785b1b | He had once found himself in a room with Lady Bessborough's long-haired white cat. He happened to be dressed in an immaculate black coat and trousers, and was there thoroughly alarmed by the cat's stalking round and round and making motions as if it proposed to sit upon him. He waited until he believed himself to be unobserved, then he picked it up, opened a window, and tossed it out. Despite falling three storeys to the ground, the cat sur.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| a86914c | If I were you, Mr. Lascelles," said Childermass, softly, "I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass's own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is our minds and hearts and speech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John's Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm .. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 572827b | The people who matter the most to us in the end, who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us. | Lan Samantha Chang | ||
| 9598802 | Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder. | graduation | Mary Karr | |
| c1dda7e | The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Ot.. | Mary Karr | ||
| cad9122 | I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you. | life work | Mary Karr | |
| 37419b5 | I learned two important things about the sound I was searching for: that it had to be indirect, refracted or muffled in some way; and that the sound had to give the impression that it would continue forever- the sound of someone practicing piano heard faintly from an unknown direction, or the sound of gentle rain outside a window, punctuated by drops falling on the casement. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 5ff364d | But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that. | loneliness | Ryū Murakami | |
| 9ac736b | Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. | parents-and-children | Ryū Murakami | |
| 01a5aa8 | I thought if I were beautiful enough, all my dreams would come true. But you don't steady beautiful forever; one day you wake up and it's gone, and then where are you? Dreams are made with blood and sweat and tears. | Ryū Murakami | ||
| 2f6d1ab | Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteria could set their hearts at ease. | hate love | Ryū Murakami | |
| 87c3b5e | That's when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn't bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn't any such thing as help in this world. | fear help helpless obsession psychosis | Ryū Murakami | |
| b1b456b | If/when I die, do not want Pam lonely. Want her to remarry, have full life. As long as new husband is nice guy. Gentle guy. Religious guy. Very caring + good to kids. But kids not fooled. Kids prefer dead dad (i.e., me) to religious guy. Pale, boring, religious guy, with no oomph, who wears weird sweaters and is always a little sad, due to, cannot get boner, due to physical ailment. Ha ha. Death very much on my mind tonight, future read.. | death life | George Saunders | |
| b6b7c72 | She's sweet but too apocalyptic. You try kissing someone good-night who's just told you for the umpteenth time that the world's experiencing its last disgusting paroxysm before Rapture. | George Saunders | ||
| 7e81646 | Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder. | George Saunders | ||
| 5719925 | There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end... Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get .. | George Saunders | ||
| ef3d394 | Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away. | Michael Chabon | ||
| ce294e2 | The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through bar.. | india modern-times | Gregory David Roberts | |
| 8c4caf1 | Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it? | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 486d84c | Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined. | Alan Lightman | ||
| e2cd0b5 | Nix: I'm actively involved in steering the lives of thousands of beings. Which directly affects hundreds of thousands, which indirectly affects millions, with a ripple effect reaching billions. If someone said, 'It ain't easy being Nixie,' I wouldn't cal him a liar. | life nix nix-the-ever-knowing soothsaying | Kresley Cole | |
| 518f152 | You promised to make me pay!' 'I intend to, Empress, but not in the way you're thinking.' His accented words were loaded with innuendo. | evie | Kresley Cole | |
| bbf9a6d | Mel exhaled. "Why are you forcing me into the voice-of-reason role? You know that never works out for us." | evie funny kresley-cole mel melissa poison-princess reason | Kresley Cole | |
| ff9b0c9 | When Sabine parted her lips to argue, Lanthe said, "This baby bird's gotta fly, sis." "Great," Sabine drawled. "She's already speaking in avian metaphors." | Kresley Cole | ||
| c4ffc1c | He clenched his jaw and forced himself to even his tone. "No' necessarily. It's just that you'll be doing it three or four times a day." "With a man of your advanced years?" " | Kresley Cole | ||
| fd73f32 | Lachlain said, "Before you go, I wanted to pass on some advice. Emma told me that to win your mate, you have to accept Regin. The two are thick as thieves. Always have been. Since they were children." "So calling Regin a glowing bluidy freak dinna help my cause? On top of the lie? Christ, I've bollixed this up." | Kresley Cole | ||
| 340e7c1 | She could read the phone book and make it sound erotic. | Kresley Cole | ||
| 272ef29 | Doona worry, I'll take care of you." He grasped her hand in his. "You're going to be all right." Chloe's gaze drifted to Loa. "That a snake?" Loa said, "She keeps death away." Chloe blinked those big eyes up at him and whispered, "Wish that was the weirdest thing . . . I've heard tonight." -- | Kresley Cole | ||
| 81e32ef | Voodoo Beer?" "In honor of Loa and Boa for chasing away death." "That was a big snake, wasn't it?""It was a seriously large snake. . . ." | kresley cole | ||
| 5b4ebde | I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life." Oliver Sacks" | Bill Hayes | ||
| 0305985 | And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: 'A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.' Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely. | Oliver Sacks | ||
| dd8a066 | I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest. | rest sabbath | Oliver Sacks | |
| 5764acb | At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze," as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I though.. | music piano | Oliver Sacks | |
| 548f669 | One inch at a time, that was how her father had taught her. You can't do anything but worry about the few inches right in front of you. | Carrie Vaughn | ||
| eea84bc | To be a DJ was to be God. To be a DJ at an alternative public radio station ? That was being God with a mission. It was thinking you were the first person to discover The Clash and you had to spread the word. | Carrie Vaughn | ||
| 5ae38e6 | Cormac interrupted. 'Maybe I oughta shoot you both, put you both out of your misery. | Carrie Vaughn | ||
| 1c16727 | A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter. | Carrie Vaughn | ||
| 5a54106 | Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist. | Colin Wilson |