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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 8f34fe3 | What a lark! What a plunge! | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 0742319 | What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?" | inspirational selflessness woman | Virginia Woolf | |
| 17cd2e1 | How fast the stream flows from January to December! | Virginia Woolf | ||
| be45060 | alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know | condemned deserted die freedom isolation joy | Virginia Woolf | |
| b4e61e7 | The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 4422631 | and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 7b790f8 | Big Ben struck the half hour. How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbors ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go - but where.. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| dd22d23 | My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 0bba324 | Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| d8b3963 | Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| d97641a | What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing t.. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| cba86f2 | Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. | Virginia Woolf | ||
| cc8d91f | And could a man sink to such triviality, such meanness, such nastiness? Could he change so much? And is it true to life? Yes, it is all true to life. All this can happen to a man. The ardent youth of today would start back in horror if you could show him his portrait in old age. As you pass from the soft years of youth into harsh, hardening manhood, be sure you take with you on the way all the humane emotions, do not leave them on the road:.. | Nikolai Gogol | ||
| 7484a0d | And so the money which to some extent may have saved the situation is spent on various means for bringing about self oblivion | Gogol Nikolai Gogol | ||
| 34bdd52 | Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was "the solution of my problems"--which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and .. | theories-of-meaning | George Lakoff | |
| 9a55229 | They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path. | Dante Alighieri | ||
| a0179e2 | Dear Reader, Dante Alighieri said, in his Inferno: "Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift." Dante lied. Our fate must be worked for. It must be paid for. With tears. With blood. With everything we have. And it is not until the end, the very end, that we will know if it was worth it." | Courtney Cole | ||
| fc4c4a9 | Why have you let your mind get so entwined," my master said, "that you have slowed your walk? Why should you care about what's whispered here? Come, follow me, and let these people talk: stand like a sturdy tower that does not shake its summit though the winds may blast; always the man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought allows the goal he's set to move far off- the force of one thought saps the other's force." | Dante Alighieri | ||
| 3581238 | And as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to the perilous waters and gazes. | Dante Alighieri | ||
| fb90064 | Meanwhile, the sword began to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all melted as ice melts when the Father eases the fetters off the frost and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power over time and tide: He is the true Lord. | Seamus Heaney | ||
| c500ceb | Be advised my passport's green. | Seamus Heaney | ||
| a8db474 | Not one of the creatures of blood can escape death. We all face it, and succumb to it. It follows us like a dark shadow. Yet if we live in terror of it, then we do not live at all. Yes we are born alone, and yes we will die alone. But in between, Tae, we live. We know joy. | David Gemmell | ||
| b01a081 | If we are still discussing its merits tomorrow, I will agree with you," said Diagoras. "Cheer up, laddie. Nobody lives forever." "Oh I expect you will, Druss, Old Horse. It's the mortals around you who always seem to kiss the granite." | David Gemmell | ||
| c1a0200 | As for myself, however, today is the day, and I dare not wait for some slow cultural drift finally to pave the way that I might easily float into some nebulous social salvation. I cannot depend on 'them' 'out there' to order into coherency this small sphere of my only present now. | Joseph Chilton Pearce | ||
| cf00acd | I was full of struggles! And that made me so happy: If I was full of struggles, maybe I was interesting! | Sharon Creech | ||
| 2f07b8b | I could tell you an extensively strange story, I warned. Oh, good! Gram said. Delicious! | Sharon Creech | ||
| e33e1e0 | But sometimes, in tight corners, when your back is against the wall and the world is against you, you have to fight back in unexpected ways. | young-adult young-adult-fiction young-adult-horror | Caroline B. Cooney | |
| 6e749c4 | That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy. | Ned Vizzini | ||
| f8390fc | I know a lot of famous people didn't do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that... but that's not going to be me. I'm not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it. | Ned Vizzini | ||
| f4edd4b | Losing yourself in a book is the best | Chris Columbus & Ned Vizzini |