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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8086bf3 | Each book was like an underwater cave, and when I rose again to the surface, I was pale and grumpy, resentful of everyone who hadn't been where I'd been. | books reading | Mary Stewart Atwell | |
| 99190c9 | But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there .. | human-condition knowing prisons science | Eugène Ionesco | |
| 0adf9a1 | I believe that family is closer to God's heart than anything else, the support system he has given us to build us up in faith, and to support us when we falter. If we want our family lives to conform to God's will, Jesus must be our priority, our focal point, in our home as well as in our ministries. That doesn't mean that it's always easy to live together: home can be the hardest place to live a Christian life. That's were people see us wh.. | Angus Buchan | ||
| d34e88c | There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 39ed6ec | the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. | walking | Rebecca Solnit | |
| 436bd66 | We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 02709cb | It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to th.. | feminism gender rebecca-solnit violence | Rebecca Solnit | |
| c1b4953 | Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupte, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise.. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| ea2fe0d | The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 8d04952 | Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can .. | Rebecca Solnit | ||
| 48713fb | Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same.. | change inspirational politics | Rebecca Solnit | |
| f6ac78b | Stay down if you know what's good for you." Colin said. He put his foot on the man's neck and applied a little weight. The man coughed into the dirt. "Who...who you?" Who am I?" Colin replied. He had been waiting for this moment. "I'm the the one bogeyman is afraid of. I'm the new face of justice. I'm your worst nightmare." He crouched down, leaning closer to the man. "You'd better warn the rest of your low-life friends that there's a ne.. | Michael Carroll | ||
| 2817dc1 | More valuable than gold, more precious than life, is mercy bestowed upon he who hast not known its soft kiss | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 017b854 | Royce hated keeping secrets from Hadrian, and it weighed heavily on his conscience, which was amazing, because he had never known he had one. Royce defined right and wrong by the moment. Right was what was best for him--wrong was everything else. | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| b07ae81 | Less talk, more screaming. | torture | Michael J. Sullivan | |
| 6e4b27d | My name is Hadrian Blackwater." "Congratulations." "Uh ... what's yours?" "Leave me alone." | Michael J. Sullivan | ||
| 99ceff4 | Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| 29e1c30 | But the fact that I couldn't hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I'd been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two, now I was closing in on it. Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward. | Susanna Kaysen | ||
| 50ae9af | She had only to open a door, nothing but a door between the words,just large enough for her and Farid to pass through.... | Cornelia Funke | ||
| 803d5d0 | What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world? | Cornelia Funke | ||
| df2bf35 | Manche Bucher mussen gekostet werden, manche verschlingt man, nur einige wenige kaut man und verdaut sie ganz. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| c639150 | How well worn they all were..."Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said when, on Meggie's last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different,.. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| e94f3fb | The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons. | Cornelia Funke | ||
| de842f4 | I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you .. | sex | Nicholson Baker | |
| d62d507 | At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention.. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| dc567c2 | And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, "How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?" And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I've written. I said, "Well, I'll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day??" T.. | Nicholson Baker | ||
| 8281677 | Extending his senses, Lorkin tried again to hear his mother's surface thoughts. What he picked up seemed too out of character, however. He must be imagining it. Though...it was also odd that he would imagine his mother thinking such a string of curse words. | trudi-canavan | Trudi Canavan | |
| d3c9ddf | I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them. I doubt I'll be lying on my deathbed in forty or fifty years, congratulating myself on the fact that I never had sex in an airplane with a handsome Italian businessman, or patting myself on the back for all those years of involuntary celibacy I endured after my divorce. If recent .. | Tom Perrotta | ||
| f06a98e | We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared. | Tom Perrotta | ||
| dc9388d | I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful. | William Saroyan | ||
| a240d29 | To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book | William Saroyan | ||
| 7fd25d8 | But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. "Pretty girls make graves," was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Ind.. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| c2f359d | We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell | Jack Kerouac | ||
| cce2e66 | No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy. | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 0b80066 | All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers. | meaning-of-life | Jack Kerouac | |
| b22af2f | Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me. | on-the-road pearl | Jack Kerouac | |
| 70a28c3 | Perche per me l'unica gente possibile sono i pazzi, quelli che sono pazzi di vita, pazzi per parlare, pazzi per essere salvati, vogliosi di ogni cosa allo stesso tempo, quelli che mai sbadigliano o dicono un luogo comune, ma bruciano, bruciano, bruciano, come favolosi fuochi artificiali color giallo che esplodono come ragni attraverso le stelle e nel mezzo si vede la luce azzurra dello scoppio centrale e tutti fanno Oooohhh | Jack Kerouac | ||
| 8058e5b | Vivir es pasar de un espacio a otro sin golpearse | Georges Perec | ||
| 61dd1c5 | The clock is impotent; mechanical time does not affect those living in an eternal present. | Paul Schrader | ||
| 37169ad | What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology. | William Gaddis | ||
| 5c3ec14 | When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out four.. | William Gaddis | ||
| 5b5ea64 | He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish? | William Gaddis | ||
| fb8b412 | You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love. | intimate love tietjens | Ford Madox Ford | |
| e4faed2 | Ma petite is not a subtle woman. Unless you say it, she will not understand it. | Laurell K. Hamilton |