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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6e2f4c9 | When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water. | details problems | John le Carré | |
| 014d4e1 | Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun? Why not follow the advice of the venerable dean of American psychiatry, Adolph Meyer, who, a century ago, cautioned psychiatrists, 'Don't scratch where it doesn't itch'? Why grapple with the most terrible, the darkest and most unchangeable aspect of life? ... Death, however, DOES itch. It itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inne.. | Irvin D. Yalom | ||
| f260c01 | One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself." | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 7b4bad8 | The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different.. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 39dfa6a | A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic. | Irvin D. Yalom | ||
| f5149ed | A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. | John le Carré | ||
| 254de6f | What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries? | John le Carré | ||
| 7d6a7f4 | He's most likely robbing the bank as a paycheck on the world for winning the ugliness prize at his local fete three years running. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 2be7ee8 | In all honesty (and I know I'm complaining excessively now), I was still getting over Stalin, in Russia. The so-called second revolution--the murder of his own people. Then came Hitler. They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thing, incessantly: "Get it done, get it done." So .. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 3c5a9bc | Words are life | Markus Zusak | ||
| cc9de7e | A statue of the book thief stood in the courtyard... it's very rare, don't you think, for a statue to appear before it's subject has become famous? | Markus Zusak | ||
| ddf3fa6 | As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning. | city dies evening fingers hope morning running sparks sunshine walk | Markus Zusak | |
| a80d9c9 | When a person's last response was Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch, you knew you had them beaten. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 075c74c | Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me. | mind thoughts truth words | Markus Zusak | |
| d08c4e4 | For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone. | okayness words writing | Markus Zusak | |
| 9a137cc | It's funny how when you watch people from a long distance, it all seems voiceless. It's like watching a silent movie. You guess what people say. You watch their mouths move and imagine the sounds of their feet hitting the ground. You wonder what they're talking about and, even more so, what they might be thinking | Markus Zusak | ||
| c051198 | Shadows of cloud lurked in the water, like holes the sun forgot about. | forgot holes shadows sun water | Markus Zusak | |
| 5a4c93c | His soul sat up. It met me.Those kinds of souls always do - the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, 'I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go of course, but I will come'. | soul the-book-thief | Markus Zusak | |
| e637b50 | Once in while a man or a woman--no, they were not men and women; they were Jews--would find Liesel's face among the crowd. They would meet her with their defeat, and the book thief could do nothing but watch them back in a long, incurable moment before they were gone again. She could only hope they could read the depth of sorrow in her face, to recognize that it was true, and not fleeting. She understood she was utterly worthless to these p.. | Markus Zusak | ||
| 6823699 | Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer. | writing | Gustave Flaubert | |
| 55e848e | Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up t.. | lydia-davis madame-bovary sad simile soul translation waiting | Gustave Flaubert | |
| 8573b13 | The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 7b181ce | No era feliz, no lo habia sido nunca. ?De donde venia, pues, aquella insuficiencia, de la vida, aquella instantanea podredumbre de las cosas en que se apoyaba?[...]. Cada sonrisa disimulaba un bostezo de aburrimiento, cada alegria una maldicion, cada placer su propio asco, y los mejores besos no dejaban sobre los labios mas que un delirio irrealizable de una voluptuosidad mas alta. | insatisfacción | Gustave Flaubert | |
| 7cc464a | By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 4924a07 | But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind's breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will .. | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 1961433 | It's so easy to wish that we'd made an effort in the past, so that we'd happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting. | Gretchen Rubin | ||
| caa7c3a | Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses. | George Eliot | ||
| f3cabfe | No retrospect will take us to the true beginning | George Eliot | ||
| 33b3c1e | Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life .. | living-abroad travel | George Eliot | |
| 24067ff | The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. | marriage relationships | George Eliot | |
| df17b71 | A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought. | humility physician psychology | George Eliot | |
| 162e12d | Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, t.. | George Eliot | ||
| 66b36ff | But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me." "What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief. "That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine struggle against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." | middlemarch | George Eliot | |
| 7cd3e4f | Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out. | George Eliot | ||
| 9b19b26 | What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 0ec89cd | I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter's evening. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 39ae2d7 | The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| f61cfca | No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever.Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Grea.. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 097633f | You...you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?" What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?" | Edward Albee | ||
| 1720dc3 | The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life... | Virginia Woolf | ||
| fe55e81 | To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 37f434e | All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 34c79d8 | She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, ladylike, critical; or ravishing, romantic. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 366bd57 | But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn tr.. | Virginia Woolf |