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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9e747cb | Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6794695 | Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 7f0a35a | In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 60292e1 | There's a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true but you haven't told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 1b3828a | I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e89c62d | Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa. | heartbreaking metaphor santa | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 3f626fe | How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 21c5699 | Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e21b2af | Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 70341d0 | Love will be our medicine. | love | Marianne Williamson | |
| d21221d | Dear God, Thank you for this new day, its beauty and its light. Thank You for my chance to begin again. Free me from the limitations of yesterday. Today may I be reborn. May I become more fully a reflection of Your radiance. Give me strength and compassion and courage and wisdom. Show me the light in myself and others. May I recognize the good that is available everywhere. | Marianne Williamson | ||
| f4788c8 | From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a c.. | David Foster Wallace | ||
| f25e50e | People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin'em it ain't so caves the roof on their heads 'n'maybe yours. | David Mitchell | ||
| f959554 | Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here? | women-s-sexuality | Naomi Wolf | |
| a34d9aa | The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again | novels | Thomas C. Foster | |
| 5eb309b | JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" [Owen Meany] said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS--THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE--THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!" | faith god miracles | John Irving | |
| 996fa66 | He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. | John Irving | ||
| 5825360 | But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination. | John Irving | ||
| 828fb25 | Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven | John Irving | ||
| 3269bd1 | In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they're foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate.. | lonliness social-anxiety | John Irving | |
| c1999fe | Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud's. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud - it was a successful soporific for the children who didn't know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, then the evening readin.. | John Irving | ||
| 908161e | And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my p.. | Vikram Chandra | ||
| 636bd42 | There are two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally wanted, it was still worth doing. A rainy day is better than no day. A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad. | Rachel Simon | ||
| 213f1de | Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to. | listened listening love rachel-simon silence the-story-of-beautiful-girl word words | Rachel Simon | |
| 78d300c | Lovers of words have no place where honest work must be done. | hard-work talking-too-much wasting-time | Karen Essex | |
| 5f64eec | One by one, the silence by the bed drew their attention. Even the king was quiet. Exhausted, relieved, he lay boneless and silent. The skin was dragged thin across his cheekbones. His sweaty hair stuck to his face, and his eyes were closed. His hand, clutching the fabric of his tunic, had relaxed and slipped down to his side, revealing what the careful bunching of the cloth had concealed. The tunic had been split by a knife stroke from one .. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| 80f4cc4 | Darker thoughts crowded in during the deepest hours of the night when he woke listening to the secret mystifying sounds of the sleeping palace. Many nights, the king was there. Pleasant, irrelevant, and distracting, he eased Relius past nightmares and self-recrimination. Some nights he said nothing at all, just comforted with his presence. Other nights he related the events of his day, spewing out his insights and analyses of the Attolian c.. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| fbdb38e | I will forgive him because I have heard him scream when someone pulled a sword out of him that could have just as easily gone into me. --Sophos | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| f97493b | We could make a treaty without a marriage." "No," he said. "You are sure?" "Yes," he said." | eugenides | Megan Whalen Turner | |
| a447cea | I woke with a terrible headache and wobbled around 'till I fell out the window." "You what?" "Fell out the window. That one over there." She [Edwina] gestured to the curtain behind her. "I broke my back. My spine is all wobbly now, but it doesn't hurt." | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| ccbe52a | I am so sick of people who all seem to be smarter than I am and know more than I do. I wanna go back to the farm. These people make my family look easy to get along with. | Megan Whalen Turner | ||
| cbcbc50 | I just wish," she said, "that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck." -- | Michel Faber | ||
| b4f6e92 | You read any Greek myths, puppy? The one about the gorgon Medusa, particularly? I used to wonder what could be so terrible that you couldn't survive even at it. Until I got a little older and I figured out the obvious answer. . | everything gorgon greek-myths medusa | Mike Carey & Peter Gross | |
| 2648198 | Spontaneity is the province of youth | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 8f381d9 | I have the impossible. I have seen great and terrible wonders, and I tell you, the world is a vaster and stranger place than ever I had reckoned. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 2eef2e7 | It is a human failing, to attribute the best of motives to those we know the least, and the worst to those we love best. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| 1d0283e | I've always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters' irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming w.. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| b18a85a | A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it's blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen. | Sy Montgomery | ||
| 3d4d030 | It was strange that Walter with all his cleverness should have so little sense of proportion. Because he had dressed a doll in gorgeous robes and set her in a sanctuary to worship her, and then discovered that the doll was filled with sawdust he could neither forgive himself nor her. His soul was lacerated. It was all make-believe that he had lived on, and when the truth shattered it he thought reality itself was shattered. It was true enou.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| d22680a | A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his pict.. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 103f11f | Two little drops in that river that flowed silently towards the unknown; two little drops that to themselves had so much individuality and to the onlooker were but an undistinguishable part of the water. | W. Somerset Maugham | ||
| 8946ae4 | The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one. | maugham women | W. Somerset Maugham | |
| b9cc07e | I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e7df765 | My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen. | intelligence media press | Diane Setterfield |